Random Acts of Cinema

Jean-Luc Godard returns to the podcast with a stylish and cunning exposé of modern French man.  Or rather, a study of how women deal with the intransigent, petulant, sometimes comical, and always fra…

Kabuki and 1950’s studio style combine in Keisuke Kinoshita’s lavish and heart-wrenching account of a rural Japanese family planning for and coping with the responsibilities and struggles of ubasute …

Internationally-neglected Spanish auteur Luis García Berlanga enters the collection neither with a bang, a whimper, a chop, nor a zap… but with a silenced gasp.  His celebrated black comedy somehow m…

And with the coming of another Rando Awards, so too passes another season of Random Acts of Cinema.  Join us as we look back and reflect on all the bests and the worsts of a solid year of Criterion f…

This podcast is dedicated to all podcasters who ever podcasted, all… Nevermind, Pedro Almodovar does it better in his tragic, heartwarming, found-family melodrama about an unlikely group of women who…

Costa-Gavras puts the viewer in the middle of a two-sided conspiracy of wrestle power in an unnamed South American nation.  At its heart: a rebel-led kidnapping scheme to force the police state to re…

You know that Scorsese movie that everyone always forgets about but also everyone says that it's really their favorite?  What seems at first glance to be just another 80s comedy reveals itself to be …

The real strength of Richard Linklater’s day-in-the-life ensemble film isn’t the cast of all-time 1990s heavy hitters. It isn’t the meticulous recreation of 1976 Austin, Texas. It’s not the teen come…

At the beginning of the 20th century, a deranged serial killer was convicted of seducing, marrying, robbing, and murdering over a dozen women.  It is believed that he killed many, many more than that…

Director Henri-Georges Clouzot maps out one of the all-time great thrillers.  “Explosive” is the right word in all possible ways to describe this film.

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Is it about corporate greed run amok?  Class warfare?  Human indulgence?  Human suffering?  Uh… the hubris of man? Well, it’s definitely not about some dumb diamond necklace.  Roy Ward Baker’s all-ti…

Special guest Michael Patrick Jann brings us an almost-lost character study of a young woman lost in a world that doesn’t value her existence. Director/Writer/Star Barbara Loden crafts a little drama…

Jacques Demy’s dazzlingly colorful palette that is perhaps more symphonic than it’s grand romantic score, sets the stage for a musical about young love and the obstacles it must endure in modern Fran…

Sweeping vistas! Dangerous men driven by greed, glory, honor, and obsession! Is this what acclaimed epic director David Lean has in store for us today?  Well… it does feature some dramatically filmed…

I can’t help it if I’m scarred from too many bad 1980s and 90s comic book movie adaptations that weren’t faithful to the source material.  I know it shouldn’t matter.  Especially if the movie was mad…

Can we chalk this up as another Walter Matthau all-time slam-dunk that most people have never heard of? Or is this old man spy caper exactly what it looks like?  We are joined by the duo Brad and Jak…

Singular-voiced American comedic auteur Bobcat Goldthwait writes, directs, and stars in his absurdist satire of the 1980s stand-up comedy scene reimagined as a grimey city infested with infighting su…

René Lalou’s timeless (well, maybe not exactly) hand drawn science fiction epic turns a skeptical eye on human systems of power in an unimaginable world of inhuman blue giants (that are somehow even …

The good days are long past for Chan and Leung, a couple slowly drifting apart, and losing themselves in the oncoming wave of modernity consisting of unemployment, debt, loneliness, and alienation.  …

There was a time, believe it or not, when the channel Bravo was willing to pay for some “celebrities” and a camera crew to get out of their comfort zones, go on various excursions around the world, a…