Random Acts of Cinema

This movie is about so much more than a rad futuristic red motorcycle ridden by a guy in a rad futuristic red leather jacket.  But don’t worry, Katsuhiro Otomo’s all-time classic cyberpunk anime is s…

Ten years after having abandoned a incomplete film, associates of director Jean Renoir gathered the footage and put together this less-than-feature-length film about a two young men who decide to spi…

Gus, River, and Keanu.  Barns falling from the sky, narcolepsy, and Shakespeare.  We know what you’re thinking: it sounds like we’re describing a movie about young male sex workers struggling to get …

This film, and consequently this episode and our discussion, demands a disclaimer up top about its troubling content.  As designed, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist stoked controversy at its release with …

It’s a Halloween miracle!  The kind where one of your favorite podcasts decides to release an episode about a spooky movie a day early so it comes out on the day in question.  Wow.  Good job, us.  We…

A movie AND the book that it’s based on?  What is this, an episode of Random Acts of Cinema or an episode of Chapter One: Take Two, amiright?  Well, it’s actually both.  This week we’ve teamed up wit…

A historical-psycho-erotic surrealist film exploring themes of womanhood, Christianity, and Freudian-infused takedowns of family and cultural identity?  Plus vampires?!  Hey Criterion Collection: Get…

This movie has some killer credits: Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift star in a Vittorio de Sica directed, David Selznick produced, Christian Dior costumed, Truman Capote dialogued romance set duri…

It’s always a special, if troubling, time on this podcast when another David Lynch film is randomly selected.  And this week we have his hotly-debated rejected-pilot-turned-feature film journey into …

Look: will we talk about the use of split screen?  Of course we will.  Will we talk about this early breakout supporting role for John Travolta?  Yep.  Will we talk about how these and more contribut…

This week we revel in the lo-octane ease of 90’s independent filmmaking with Richard Linklater’s love letter to love and travel, and discussions about love and travel.  Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke 90…

Sorry this episode is posting a little late this week, but we wanted to add a little extra no-dialogue silence to our discussion of Kaneto Shindo’s similarly dialogue-free year-in-the-life of a famil…

This is a movie that sells itself.  Director Agnieszka Smoczyńska‘s musical is about flesh-eating mermaids working in a sleazy cabaret/strip club in 1980s Poland. That deranged mash-up of a premise p…

It’s first episode for one of our theme song directors!  And one of your hosts went a little overboard getting up to speed with the works of Rainer Werner Fassbender.  Honestly, a lot of the typical …

Boy oh boy, we really crack the nut of red scare allegories this time! Or we don’t.  Hard to say which.  But we have a great time talking about rural Southern California, divorce, imposters, whatever…

The word “game” has two meanings.  So that means that the title of director Ernest B. Schoedsack’s The Most Dangerous Game can also mean…wait…oh no…oh god…run!  RUN!!  Anyway, it seems like we spend …

“All around me are familiar faces, worn out places, worn out faces.”

You know what rhymes with “faces”?  “Places”.  Know what rhymes with “places”?  “Faces”.  If you like this kind of clever word pla…

Why not just jumpstart the sub-genre of body horror by inventing a whole new pseudoscience called psychoplasmic therapy that allows for the fears of divorce, children, and past mental traumas to lite…

It’s that time of the…decade again. And we’ve got international amateur athletic competition fever! In honor of the return of the Olympic Games to Japan, we’re watching one of the great documentaries…

We’re dipping back into the Henry James-adaptation pool with William Wyler’s Olivia de Havilland vehicle The Heiress, based on Washington Square.  Making this a period piece featuring a kind of funho…