Random Acts of Cinema

Reflections, prisms, the dance of car lights across a rain sprinkled window to a Parisian cafe.  It sure looks like we’re reviewing some 1990s art house cinema this week.  And we are are doing exactl…

Now we’re talking.  This is some serious Criterion Collection viewing right here.  Pedro Costa’s docufiction is a snail’s-paced meditation on the lives of the largely Cape Verde immigrants living in …

Ah, if only we could go back to the bohemian nexus of the American folk scene in 1960s Greenwich village.  To be among the beatnicks and intellectuals, musical anthropologists and legendary performer…

A plucky trio of young contributors to the Allied war effort find themselves caught up in a dastardly plot to poor glue in girls’ hair in a small English town. But mostly they all just come to learn …

We’ve gone from a man-on-the-run crime drama made in 1979 Japan, to another only made in 1960 Italy and France.  Claude Sautet’s Classe Tous Risques offers us a classic crime film full of desperate m…

Shohei Imamura’s study of a killer on the run and the family members and victims that he leaves in his wake is presented as a fact-based accounting of dates, names, and crimes.  At least, that’s what…

One evening in 1954, Marylin Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and Senator Joseph McCarthy gathered in Albert Einstein’s New York City hotel room to excitedly monologue at one another about subjects like fame, s…

To celebrate the Collection’s 1000th spine number, we’re reviewing the film that started the kaiju-craze of the 20th century: Ishiro Honda’s 1954 masterpiece Godzilla. Because we’re SOOO clever, we g…

With our first random foray into the silent era, Harold Loyld’s comic romance The Kid Brother - officially helmed by director Ted Wilde - has a plot. It’s fine. Charming enough. But really it’s platf…

The first true B-movie entry into our randomized journey through the Criterion Collection starts with a mushroom cloud of a bang.  Spencer Gordon Bennett’s The Atomic Submarine (1959) follows the int…

We follow up last week’s selection with one of the Hollywood classics that inspired it.  Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows melodrama challenges conservative America’s expectations of age, class, …

Holding onto the dream of bourgeois America has never seemed so impossible, stupid, crass, and funny as in Jon Waters’ Polyester (1981).  Divine heads up a cast of Waters-regulars and boorish newcome…

Bowie! Sakamoto! Obsession! Uh, POW camp! And...war atrocities!? Torture? Ritual suicide? A subtle exploration of the despondency of an officer in charge of a prison camp facing the different cultura…

Stylistic pastiche. Symmetrical framing. Murray. Schwartzman. 1960s-centric jukebox soundtrack. It looks like this must be our first Wes Anderson movie. A tale of young love set against scouting, par…

We're back into The Collection with another heavy-hitter. And it's our first foray into the French New Wave film's of Francois Truffaut. Paris! Kidnapping! Murder! Secret identities! Flashbacks! Shoo…

Is the 11th episode the right time for a podcast retrospective? It is if you need to hand out a bunch of prestigious Randies, the official awards of the Random Acts of Cinema podcast. Come join us as…

Hitchock.  Bergman.  Peck.  And...Salvador Dali?  Sounds about right. Let’s see whether or not using psychoanalysis and the combined dream-logic of cinema and surrealist art as devices to advance the…

In our first break from format we’re following up last week’s movie - The Mikado (1939) - with a film exploring the men behind that comic opera: Gilbert and Sullivan. At first, Mike Leigh’s historica…

Imagine it’s 1939.  The world stands at the precipice of war.  So why not make a film adaptation of a classic English comic opera set in Imperial Japan, but all of the character and place names are s…

This random number generator selection process that we’re using seems to be doing the trick. For what better way to follow up a 1960s Czech medieval drama than a 1980s British coming-of-age comic dra…