Hope, the wild new sci-fi epic from The Wailing director Na Hong-jin, is coming to The Frida Cinema!
In the remote South Korean village of Hope Harbor, police chief Bum-seok and officer Sung-ae are called to investigate a mysterious creature wreaking havoc on the community. But all is not as it seems, and perceptions can be misleading. What begins as ignorance plants the seed of disaster, escalating through human conflict into a tragedy of cosmic proportions.
Starring Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Hoyeon, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Taylor Russell, Hope is a sprawling, genre-bending monster movie that mixes Korean thriller intensity with wild sci-fi spectacle. The film premiered in Competition at Cannes, where it received a six-minute standing ovation, and has already been hailed for its ferocious action and audacious filmmaking.
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Ngozi Onwurah’s radically ahead-of-its-time Afrofuturist vision Welcome II The Terrordome made history as the first theatrically distributed British feature directed by a Black woman, and thirty years later, it’s coming back to the big screen in a brand new 4K restoration thanks to Janus Films.
Largely dismissed upon its release by critics unable to see the urgency in its evocation of a gritty dystopia in which Black people have been relegated to living in a slum called the Terrordome, where simmering racial tension threatens to boil over in the wake of a young boy’s death.
Onwurah’s fusion of political commentary and genre spectacle looks extremely prescient now, and her ability to build an entire cosmology that connects the history of slavery to present-day police brutality is nothing less than visionary.
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Board the submarine Nautilus and plunge into a strange undersea world of spellbinding adventure as we kick off our Walt Disney Studies series with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea! This evening’s event will be hosted by Jeff Kurtti with a post-screening presentation by Disney Historian Kevin Kidney!
Kirk Douglas, Paul Lukas, and Peter Lorre star as shipwrecked survivors taken captive by the mysterious Captain Nemo, brilliantly portrayed by James Mason. Wavering between genius and madness, Nemo has launched a deadly crusade across the seven seas. But can the captive crew expose his evil plan before he destroys the world?
Disney’s brilliant Academy Award®-winning (Best Art Direction and Best Special Effects) adaptation of Jules Verne’s gripping tale makes 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea a truly mesmerizing masterpiece, his first feature in the widescreen CinemaScope process!
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Released in 1982 to near-instant cult status, Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky is a surreal collision of new wave, fashion, drugs, and extraterrestrial weirdness, and easily one of the strangest movies to emerge from New York’s downtown scene. Anne Carlisle stars as both Margaret and Jimmy, a pair of androgynous club kids whose chaotic lives are upended when a tiny alien spacecraft lands on the roof of their apartment building. Leaving a trail of increasingly bizarre encounters in its wake, as well as a few dead bodies, the alien has come to Earth in search of a mysterious substance produced during human sexual activity. Shot on the streets and in the clubs of early-’80s Manhattan, and on an extremely low budget estimated at approximately $500,000, Liquid Sky nevertheless exudes a look and attitude that feel remarkably ahead of their time.
Released during the height of the early-’80s New York new wave scene, Liquid Sky has become a cult touchstone for anyone interested in the intersection of underground cinema, electronic music, NY fashion, and queer nightlife. The soundtrack to Liquid Sky is as strange and distinctive as the movie itself. Composer Brenda I. Hutchinson and director Slava Tsukerman built the score around primitive synthesizers, electronic textures, and the sounds of New York’s downtown club scene, creating something that feels less like a conventional movie score than music beamed in from another planet. A slight cheat in our Unsung 80’s Soundtracks series in the sense that Liquid Sky’s sounds are more of a score, its entirely synthetic soundtrack, mirroring the film’s icy visual palette and alienated characters, felt like an essential for the era.
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Calling all blondes! Join us for Julien Temple’s gloriously goofy 1988 sci-fi musical Earth Girls Are Easy – a true essential in our Unsung 80’s Soundtracks series!
Geena Davis stars as Valerie, a manicurist whose boring life takes an unexpected turn when a a trio of extraterrestrials crash-lands in her San Fernando Valley swimming pool. Played by Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey, and Damon Wayans, the three furry E.T.’s are soon given a makeover by Valerie and her ultra-bubbly best friend Candy (Julie Brown, who also served as co-screenwriter), and given the new names of Mac, Wiploc, and Zeebo. Valerie takes them out into the strange world of late-’80s Los Angeles, where they quickly discover the pleasures of Earth life, from dancing to romance to surfing to – why not? – even a couple of musical numbers.
Loaded with some of the era’s most recognizable alternative and new-wave sounds by British punk provocateur and music-video director Temple, Earth Girls Are Easy feels like a two-hour mixtape from the end of the 1980s. The soundtrack features the B-52’s, The Vandals, The Cramps, Devo, The Go-Go’s, and The Tubes, along with original songs performed by the film’s cast. The soundtrack was released as a companion album in 1988, and has become a sonic time capsule of the late-’80s neon, campy, “far out” alternative scene.
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Best buds. Worst adults.
The Wrong Girls, starring Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat, is coming to The Frida Cinema for one night only on Thursday, August 27th!
Two codependent best friends living paycheck to paycheck and bong rip to bong rip get caught in a case of mistaken identity that throws their lives into chaos.
With its bizarre premise, stellar leads, and awesome supporting cast (LaKeith Stanfield, Zack Fox, Tony Hale…the list goes on and on) The Wrong Girls makes a very good time at the movies!
Enhanced Accessibility: this film has Closed Captioning, Assisted Listening, and Audio Description capability!
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An Ordinary Man Forced to Become An Extraordinary Hero.
Join us at The Frida Cinema on September 9th as Nostalgic Nebula presents a 35th anniversary screening of The Rocketeer!
Set against the backdrop of 1938 Los Angeles, the film follows stunt pilot Cliff Secord, whose life is turned upside down after he discovers a mysterious rocket pack that allows him to take to the skies. But with the FBI, mobsters, and Nazi spies all racing to claim the incredible invention, Cliff must become an unlikely hero to protect both the woman he loves and the future of aviation itself.
Be sure to show up early for behind-the-scenes clips and answer trivia questions about The Rocketeer and your other favorite retro-futuristc movies!
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The brand new Afrofuturist film Memory of Princess Mumbi is coming to The Frida Cinema!
In 2093, filmmaker Kuve travels to Umata to document the aftermath of a war that revived ancient kingdoms. There, he meets Mumbi, who challenges him to make his film without the use of AI. As Kuve searches for his own voice, he begins to realize that even in a broken world, beauty can be found in the small human moments we often overlook.
The film premiered at Venice Days (Giornate degli Autori) in 2025 and went on to TIFF, BFI London, Zurich Film Festival (where it won the Critics’ Jury Award for Best Swiss Film), and San Francisco International Film Festival (where it received an Honorable Mention in the Global Visions category).
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Nu-Classics is back at The Frida Cinema, as this time around, our beloved host Maggie Mae Fish is joined by novelist and video essayist Lindsay Ellis for a very special screening celebrating thirty years since the release of Independence Day!
Strange phenomena surface around the globe. The skies ignite. Terror races through the world’s major cities. As these extraordinary events unfold, it becomes increasingly clear that a force of incredible magnitude has arrived. Its mission: total annihilation over the Fourth of July weekend. The last hope to stop the destruction is an unlikely group of people united by fate and unimaginable circumstances.
Upon its release in 1996, Independence Day became a global phenomenon, redefining what audiences expected from summer movie spectacle. Its earnest patriotism and larger-than-life action paved the way for many blockbusters that came after. Whether you’re revisiting it for the hundredth time or experiencing it on the big screen for the first time, this is the kind of movie that reminds us why theaters were built to be loud! Also…come on, a movie with Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum?
Lindsay Ellis is a novelist and video essayist residing in Long Beach, CA. After studying Cinema Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she earned her MFA in Film and Television Production from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts with a focus in documentary and screenwriting. As a video essayist she wrote and co-hosted the fiction-focused web series It’s Lit! for PBS Digital Studios. She continues to make video essay and documentary content for YouTube and the streaming service Nebula. Her novels include Apostles of Mercy, Truth of the Divine and Axiom’s End, which was a New York Times best seller. Her nonfiction debut, Degenerates, a survey of how fascists and authoritarians appropriate and censor the arts, is slated for release in 2028.
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In the basement of a university medical school, Dr. Jessup floats naked in total darkness. The most terrifying experiment in the history of science is out of control…and the subject is himself.
It’s Ken Russell Season (wink wink) around here, as we’re palying a late night one-off of Altered States, one of the wildest studio films ever made.
A research scientist (The late, great William Hurt) explores the boundaries and frontiers of human consciousness. Using sensory deprivation and hallucinogenic mixtures from Native American shamans, he explores these altered states of cognizance and finds that memory, time, and reality itself are states of mind.
Altered States is a head-on collision between prestige science fiction, body horror, psychedelia, and New Age philosophy, making it a perfect late night cinematic experience!
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