Random Acts of Cinema

There’s a reading of this movie as Jean Renoir’s exercise in delayed gratification. What’s a cancan? Is that a cancan? Will they cancan? Oh no they can’t cancan!! But maybe, just maybe… No they can’t…

Director Brad Silberling’s modern spiritual masterpiece dares to propose a world filled with unseen angels, who look upon humanity with a detached sense of whimsy.  Until a brash, brilliant, and beau…

Come gather 'round children, it's high time ye learned. About a hero named Harlan County and a devil named Duke Power.  

The fight never stops.  And Barbara Kopple’s beautifully specific and devastat…

Bonus episode drop!  We recorded this a while ago, but we’re finally releasing the rankings of our 10 highest rated criterion movies.  Sure we each gave Rashomon 10 out of 10.  But we also gave The S…

Please come celebrate our 300th episode with spine number 300!  We grapple with our legacy, come to terms with our many failures, reaffirm old friendships, get matching outfits, mourn our losses, go …

Your humble hosts stumble happily headlong into the world of avant-pop Moroccan folk music!  This week we watch what seems to be a proto-version of The Last Waltz (even though it’s not) with a docume…

Bond is back! …to this podcast.  We swing back into the world of Ian Fleming with the second film adaptation of his books, and perhaps the most faithful to the original source material.  So does that…

For this week’s episode your hosts intentionally try to make the WORST episode they’ve ever recorded.  No wait, that’s what this Mel Brooks movie is about.  Oh, now I remember: this is actually the B…

One of us is prepared to insist that this Academy Award winning film is more than just “that fish-sex movie.”  

A little behind the scenes: in our recording schedule notes Mike keeps writing the titl…

Director Jacques Demy returns to the podcast with a notably non-musical romance this time.  Gone are the songs and vibrant colors, instead we are given… crushing, co-dependent gambling addictions?  C…

Spoiler alert. In this movie Christopher Lee stabs Boris Karloff and Boris Karloff throws acid in Christopher Lee’s face. And there’s some stuff about 19th century medical experiments, but mostly tha…

Neither a documentary on the films of David Lynch nor a film about the man we knew as David Lynch.  But an account of a young man who through circumstance and single-minded drive, would find himself …

For one of us, this is where it all began.  You leave me breathless… ahhhhh….  That’s from a different movie though.

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This week we return to the Shohei Imamura’s “Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes” collection with his “entomological study” of one woman’s lifelong struggle for survival and purpose in a cruel modern world.…

Legendary 1980s/90s Hong Kong/Hollywood action auteur John Woo sets an early pace for his legendary career with a period-kung fu movie about two swordsman-buddies caught in the midst of a bloody reve…

From the clanky jangle of that first Tom Waits song to that jangly clank of the last Tom Waits song, you know you are in for a treat.  Jim Jarmusch pops back up on the show with his humanist antholog…

Cat, piano, well, watermelon, mirror, bananas.  You know, you're basic horror movie formula.  Director Nobuhiko Obayashi spins a eerily formulaic but wildly unanticipate-able story of teens.  And dea…

What says “Merry Christmas” more than a sexy tale of infidelity and alienation set against the backdrop of soviet invasion and oppression?  In the Criterion Collection?  Not much. Join us as we discu…

It’s Orson Welles! It’s Shakespeare! Everyone involved is at the top of their game! Filmed across continents on location! It was a labor of love 3 years in the making!  Yep. No problems here. None at…

Albert & Allen Hughes take a stab at the classic tale of the American twentieth century with a star-studded cast and a sweeping narrative starting in the Bronx of 1968, the bloody jungles of Vietnam,…