We’re cutting a little deeper with the second film in our Black Gloves & Crimson Blood series, straight into the subconscious of filmmaker Dario Argento with the nightmarish pairing of Four Flies On Grey Velvet and Door Into Darkness!
In Four Flies on Grey Velvet, the final entry in Argento’s “Animal Trilogy,” a rock drummer becomes ensnared in a blackmail plot that spirals into surreal paranoia and psychedelic dread. Rarely screened and long shrouded in cult mystique, it’s a slippery, dreamlike thriller featuring one of Argento’s most unforgettable death sequences.
Then: Door into Darkness, Argento’s rare foray into television. Acting as both host and creative force, he delivers a chilling episode that strips murder down to its most primal, procedural elements!
There will be a 15 minute intermission between the movies. One ticket purchase gets you access to both films.
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Our descent into the delirious world of Dario Argento begins with a blood-soaked one-two punch: his genre-defining debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and its twisted, paranoid follow-up The Cat O’ Nine Tails.
With Plumage, Argento burst onto the international stage, fusing Hitchcockian suspense with a bold visual style that would come to define the Giallo genre. It’s a razor-sharp thriller told through black leather gloves, shattered memories, and the killer’s point of view. Just a year later, The Cat O’ Nine Tails took the formula deeper into conspiracy and scientific obsession—doubling down on the tension, body count, and baroque atmosphere.
These are murder mysteries where the plot is secondary to sensation. Fear is a color, violence is choreography, and the camera is a voyeur. Don’t miss these two Italian horror classics on the big screen! There will be a 15 minute intermission between the movies. One ticket purchase gets you access to both films.
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Part science fiction, part noir, part poetry—Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville remains a landmark of experimental French New Wave cinema. On its 60th anniversary, step into a hypnotic future now remastered in 4K for the perfect big screen experience!
Lemmy Caution is on a mission to eliminate Professor Von Braun, the creator of a malevolent computer that rules the city of Alphaville. Befriended by the scientist’s daughter Natasha, Lemmy must unravel the mysteries of the strictly logical Alpha 60 and teach Natasha the meaning of the word “love.”
Don’t miss this rare chance to see one of cinema’s most influential dystopias on the big screen—where its stark beauty and radical ideas truly belong.
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This August, The Frida Cinema proudly presents Greenaway & Nyman, a film series celebrating four of the most iconic collaborations between filmmaker Peter Greenaway and composter Michael Nyman. Our series opens with the film that marked the beginning of their prolific and celebrated partnership, 1982’s The Draughtsman’s Contract. This film marked the beginning of a prolific and celebrated partnership, with Nyman’s driving, baroque score becoming an essential element of Greenaway’s distinct visual style.
Set in the lush English countryside at the close of the 17th century, The Draughtsman’s Contract is a labyrinthine tale of art, seduction, and deception. When Mrs. Virginia Herbert commissions a young, arrogant artist named Mr. Neville to produce a series of detailed drawings of her estate, their arrangement includes not only payment, but certain intimate privileges. As Neville obsessively sketches the grounds with mathematical precision, he begins to uncover cryptic clues and shifting allegiances that suggest a darker intrigue beneath the estate’s manicured surface.
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Fans of atmospheric horror and psychological dread are in luck! The next film in our Hallucinations series is 1971’s Let’s Scare Jessica To Death!
Recently released from a mental institution, Jessica moves to the countryside with her husband and a friend, hoping for peace and a fresh start. Instead, she finds whispers in the orchard, strangers in the lake, and the creeping suspicion that either she’s being haunted—or she’s slipping back into madness. Directed by John Hancock, scored with ghostly minimalism, and photographed like a faded dream, this is New England horror at its most hushed and haunting.
Released in 1971 to little fanfare and growing cult reverence, it remains one of the most quietly devastating and psychically destabilizing horror films of its era.
Hosted by Polygon’s editor-in-chief Chris Plante, Hallucinations is a monthly event that spotlights movies that challenge our expectations of story, style, and “good taste”. Plante will introduce each film with some behind-the-scenes history and critical context. With Hallucinations, The Frida Cinema wants to build a communal space for lovers of Weird Cinema. We invite guests to bond over films that change what we expect from the medium, the world, and themselves. So come early, stay late, make friends, and watch something strange, surprising, or just shamelessly sick.
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Paul Thomas Anderson’s shaggy dog detective story in flip-flops and a denim jacket, Inherent Vice adapts Thomas Pynchon’s psychedelic noir into a deliriously funny trip through the fogged-out tail end of the 1960s.
Joaquin Phoenix is Doc Sportello—private eye, deeply stoned romantic, and very possibly the last good man in Los Angeles—as he stumbles through a tangled conspiracy involving real estate developers, surf saxophonists, runaway girlfriends, and something called the Golden Fang.
With a killer cast (Josh Brolin! Katherine Waterston! Owen Wilson! Reese Witherspoon! Martin Short!), a dreamy Jonny Greenwood score, and PTA’s most straight-up goofy film to date, Inherent Vice is a smokey ode to things slipping away one step at a time.
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Fireworks, parades, patriotic bunting—and one sound that doesn’t belong. A scream? A gunshot? A tire blowout? No Fourth Of July celebration at The Frida would be complete without Brian De Palma’s 1981 masterpiece Blow Out!
John Travolta gives one of his best performances as Jack Terry, a sound technician for low-budget horror flicks who accidentally records a political assassination while gathering ambient sound one night. What follows is a paranoid plunge into reel-to-reel surveillance, media manipulation, and a conspiracy no one wants to hear.
A riff on Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Coppola’s The Conversation, but soaked in De Palma’s signature split-diopter style and operatic tension, Blow Out turns patriotic imagery into a nightmare canvas—stars and stripes flickering under streetlamps and firecrackers masking murder. Featuring Nancy Allen, John Lithgow in full psycho-mode, and a finale that literally weaponizes Independence Day spectacle, this is one of the sharpest political thrillers of the 1980s and one of De Palma’s true masterpieces.
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Taking our Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema series into the 90’s is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s heart-pounding 1997 thriller Cure, widely regarded as one of the best, most original, and most influential psychological horror films of the decade.
A detective investigates a string of grisly murders—each victim killed in the same ritualistic manner, each murderer caught at the scene, unable to explain why they did it. The only connection? A mysterious drifter who seems to erase people’s memories—and unlock something buried deep inside them.
With icy precision and a creeping sense of dread, Cure is not just a murder mystery—it’s a meditation on identity and unraveling. Shot in long, haunting takes and drained colors, the film moves like a fog over post-economic-boom Japan: quiet and uncertain.
Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema is a curated 12-film trip through the evolution of Japan—from the quiet post-war resilience of the 1940s all the way to the radical reinventions of the 1990s. This July-October, we will explore a new facet of this incredible nation’s cinematic journey throughout the 20th century. All films will be presented in their original Japanese language with English subtitles, at a reduced ticket price of $8.
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A haunting masterpiece of Japanese cinema, Ugetsu is the second film in our Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema series. Kenji Mizoguchi’s hypnotic camera work, long takes, and atmospheric composition make Ugetsu a meditative, otherworldly experience that influenced filmmakers from Kurosawa to Scorsese. Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, this is a film where myth and history blur, inviting us to reflect on the consequences of human folly.
Made just eight years after WWII, the film uses a ghostly narrative to process national memory and warn against repeating the same mistakes. Ugetsu exemplifies how Japanese filmmakers of the 1950s turned to allegory and aesthetics to navigate complex postwar identities—elevating cinema to poetry.
Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema is a curated 12-film trip through the evolution of Japan—from the quiet post-war resilience of the 1940s all the way to the radical reinventions of the 1990s. Each Monday this July-September, we will explore a new facet of this incredible nation’s cinematic journey throughout the 20th century! All films will be presented in their original Japanese language with English subtitles!
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XYZ Films is bringing you the new film Tatami, being described as a combination of Raging Bull and The Passion of Joan of Arc!
The first feature film co-directed by Iranian and Israeli filmmakers Guy Nattiv and Zar Amir, Tatami follows Leila, an Iranian judo athlete who is put in political danger when her government tells her to fake an injury and withdraw from the world championships rather than face an Israeli rival in the final.
Leila finds herself facing a life-or-death decision that could put the lives of her, her coach, an ex-competitor herself, and her family in danger. In a fight for freedom and dignity, what is she willing to give up.
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