Random Acts of Cinema

David Lynch’s follow-up to one of the most disturbing and lovingly crafted pieces of auteur cinema ever made is… an Oscar-bait biopic? Sure: he brazenly assaults Victorian (and maybe even a few moder…

This week, it’s Moonstruck.  Thank God: it’s Moonstruck.

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If you throw everything at the wall (romance, screwball comedy, noir thriller, globe-trotting action) you will ALMOST predict one of the great disasters of the twentieth century.  This coincidence is…

Get ready for another action-packed…Yasuhiro Ozu movie?  Well, at least compared to his other masterpieces.  Buckle up for this bracingly gentle study of a middle-aged married couple as they lightly …

Two unlikely kindred souls find purpose and companionship as they wander through the cross-continental 1970s in search of a sense of… just a little stability. Wim Wenders sets the tone for his career…

Is this the one where Keanu takes a bunch of future drugs?  I mean that DOES sound kind of like a Cronenberg movie…. No wait!  It’s the head exploding one.  Except that maybe, just maybe, this early …

Soviet cinema at its most… spiritual?  Iconoclast director Sergei Parajanov’s deeply personal exploration of the cultural echoes found in the life of 18th-century Armenian troubadour/monk Sayat-Nova …

Content warning: this film contains depictions of suicide.

Come check out Mike and Charlie realizing exactly what they’ve gotten themself into AFTER watching this movie and getting about halfway thro…

Kansas.  The Great Salt Lake.  Peaches Christ.  Michael Varrati.  Abandoned carnival.  Am I listing the components of an unlikely-to-happen but likely-to-be-wild road trip?  Or is it the perfect form…

Directing duo Arie and Chula Esiri tell two separate stories of would-be Nigerian emigrants navigating through a dehumanizing world that uses poverty and debt to perpetuate a cycle of exploitation th…

Look: if for some reason you DON’T want to watch Richard E. Grant rant about the entrenched conspiracy between the wretchedly corrupt spheres of big business and government in the form of consumer ad…

Balancing on the razor-thin edge between the pedantic “what would REALLY happen if a guy kept slowly shrinking?” with “sure nerd, but let’s still make it a fun story”, Jack Arnold directs a domestic …

Kevin Allison (Risk! and The State) joins us to talk about Kyoshi Kurosawa’s hypno-thriller - a term I’ve invented which cheapens the film - and he directs the conversation toward Carl Jung’s concept…

This week the question is asked: does having had read The Deadly Percheron enhance the viewing experience of this grimy, English, 80s neo-noir about sex work, blackmail, and unrequited love?  It turn…

Coming of age story?  Sexual awakening?  Road trip movie?  These all characterize Alfonso Cuarón’s tale of two young men and  one women whose lives intersect for a brief period one summer… kind of.  …

Certainly not the arty-ist neo-noir ever made, but it’s certainly the most Jean-Pierre Melville-ian neo-noir ever made.  And that’s more than enough to make this one of the most widely-beloved of a…

Can Master Wong navigate China into the 20th-century and past the obstacles of modernity, invasive western culture, and a whole host of outside threats to tradition?  Of course he can.  But even he’s…

When 20 or so upper class reveler’s end up at a post-opera gathering hosted by one of their peers, everything seems perfectly… polite.  But then director Luis Buñuel imparts upon them the one unbreak…

“Bowie to Bowie… Come in Bowie…” So begins a completely unrelated piece of Bowie-related media that one of us wishes he watched instead. Come have a listen to find out which of us has the appetite (o…