The brand new Afrofuturist film Memory of Princess Mumbi is coming to The Frida Cinema! And make sure to get their early for a special in-person introduction by the film’s director, Damien Hauser!
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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Just added: Nathan Bexton will be joining us to introduce our 10:15PM screening of Nowhere on August 21st!
Also just added: James Duval and Nathan Bexton will be joining us to introduce the 10:30PM screening of Nowhere on August 22nd!
Let the love feast begin.
We’re concluding Gregg Araki’s legendary Teen Apocalypse Trilogy with Nowhere, a delirious, end-of-the-millennium fever dream that’s turned up to eleven.
In Los Angeles, a colorful assortment of bohemians try to make sense of their intersecting lives. The moody Dark Smith, his bisexual girlfriend, her lesbian lover and their shy gay friend plan on attending the wildest party of the year. But they’ll only make it if they can survive the drug trips, suicides, trysts, mutilations and alien abductions that occur as one surreal day unfolds.
The most visually audacious entry in the trilogy, Nowhere is Araki experimenting with science fiction, queer romance as a euphoric celebration of outsiders, making it the perfect culmination of one of the boldest trilogies in American independent cinema.
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From the Amazon’s forbidden depths comes…Creature from the Black Lagoon!
Cinematic Void is invading The Frida Cinema again to present one of the crown jewels of Universal’s monster canon that introduced audiences to the unforgettable Gill-man!
When scientists exploring the Amazon River stumble on a “missing link” connecting humans and fish, they plan to capture it for later study. But the Creature has plans of his own, and has set his sights on the lead scientist’s beautiful fiancée, Kay.
Combining atmospheric underwater photography and unforgettable creature effects, the film remains a marvel of 1950s genre filmmaking. More than seventy years later, the Gill-man still stands among cinema’s most iconic monsters, re-surfacing from the depths every so often to captivate new generation of moviegoers.
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July’s Hallucinations pick is the delightfully strange Musical Fantasy Tomorrow, featuring an early leading performance from the incomparable Olivia Newton-John!
In a whimsical future where science, music, and imagination collide, a brilliant young inventor and his eccentric companions set out on an adventure that spans planets, generations, and dimensions.
Released years before Grease would make her an international icon, Tomorrow offers a fascinating glimpse of Olivia Newton-John at the dawn of her screen career. Overflowing with colorful visuals and catch tunes, Tomorrow is a charming reminder that we used to make movies like this!
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”. 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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Our second Volunteer of the Month pick for July comes via Avalon, who has chosen chosen the hallucinatory body-horror classic Videodrome from visionary filmmaker and certified sicko David Cronenberg.
As the president of a trashy TV channel, Max Renn is desperate for new programming to attract viewers. When he happens upon “Videodrome,” a TV show dedicated to gratuitous torture and punishment, Max sees a potential hit and broadcasts the show on his channel. However, after his girlfriend auditions for the show and never returns, Max investigates the truth behind Videodrome and discovers that the graphic violence may not be as fake as he thought.
Videodrome remains one of Cronenberg’s most provocative and unsettling works. Filled with unforgettable practical effects and audacious ideas, the film predicts a world consumed by screens while asking who controls the images we consume.
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Abby, a brilliant, young neuroscientist who has recently lost her father, drowns her grief by spending her days working with a monkey named Dorey. Abby meets a programmer, Sam, who has created a technology that reconnects Abby with her beloved father. Her relationship with her digitized dad then forces her to re-examine everything from her romantic relationships to her life’s work.
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Our Spielberg Summer series concludes with some post-Thanksgiving screenings of War of the Worlds, his hauntingly realistic reinvention of a Sci Fi classic that transforms an alien invasion into a terrifying story of survival.
When colossal extraterrestrial machines suddenly emerge from beneath the Earth and begin annihilating entire cities, divorced dockworker Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) is forced to protect his children as civilization collapses around them. As humanity struggles to comprehend the scale of the catastrophe, Ray’s desperate journey becomes a fight not to save the world, but simply to keep his family alive.
Released in the shadow of a newly changed America, War of the Worlds channels post-9/11 anxieties into some of the most intense and visceral spectacle of Spielberg’s career. Stripping away triumphalism in favor of fear, the film stands as one of his darkest works. It’s a reminder that even at his most pessimistic, Spielberg never loses sight of the human beings at the center of the story, making it the perfect film to conclude our 14 film retrospective of his work.
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What would you do if were framed for a murder…you had not committed yet?
The penultimate film in our Spielberg Summer series is the Tom Cruise-starrer Minority Report, a dazzling Sci Fi Thriller that imagines a world where crime can be stopped before it happens.
In Washington, D.C., of 2054, police captain John Anderton (Tom Cruise) leads a revolutionary unit that uses psychic visions to arrest murderers before they commit their crimes. But when Anderton himself is identified as a future killer, he goes on the run, determined to uncover the truth behind a system he once believed was infallible.
Based on the novel by Philip K. Dick, the film combines breathtaking action, Noir intrigue (something you’d think would be in more Spielberg projects), and startlingly prescient ideas about surveillance and predictive technology, making it one of smartest blockbusters of the 21st century.
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Our Spielberg Summer series ventures off-path and into the Fall as we visit the future in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a haunting Science Fiction fairy tale that stands among the director’s most ambitious and deeply misunderstood works.
In a world where advanced robots live alongside humans, a young android named David (Haley Joel Osment) is programmed with the ability to love. When he is abandoned by the family he was created to join, David embarks on an extraordinary journey to become “real,” believing it is the only way to win back the affection he longs for.
Originally developed by Stanley Kubrick and ultimately realized by Spielberg, A.I. is an unsettling vision of technological loneliness. Over two decades later, its questions about what it means to love feel more relevant than ever, revealing a far more profound than many audiences recognized upon its release.
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Something has survived.
Our Spielberg Summer series ventures to The Lost World: Jurassic World, the oft-maligned sequel to the 1993 classic.
When mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) is pulled back into the dinosaur project after a second island is discovered, he joins a rescue expedition that quickly becomes a fight for survival as corporate greed and apex predators collide. What begins as a mission of observation spirals into full-scale chaos when dinosaurs prove, once again, who is higher on the food chain.
Darker and much more unruly than its predecessor, The Lost World: Jurassic Park explores the consequences of trying to manage wonder once it’s been unleashed. Spielberg leans into scale and spectacle, building some of the best set pieces of his career, each more intense than the last.
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