Random Acts of Cinema

Chic style and a confoundingly lithe ability to shift between classic-cool genres, director Jean-Jacques Beineix plots a Parisian escapade of crime, obsession, genius, whimsy, opera, sex, speed, an…

Stubborn, single-minded obsession forms the icy heart of Teinosuke Kinugasa's sweeping Shakespearean action-drama set in the aftermath of the bloody Heiji Rebellion.

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Ol Blue Eyes is back!  Back from the Korean War and brainwashed by sinister communist agents, that is.  Director John Frankenheimer bends minds and our expectations in his stylishly paranoid thriller…

Director Les Blank turns his unsparing eye on obsessive visionary director Werner Herzog as he trudges through a years-long journey to film Fitzcarraldo in the South American rainforest.  Everything …

A uproarious takedown of English class and gender constructions… or a staunch defender of them?  At least one of us thinks that this very ambiguity is the whole fun of Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howa…

Agnès Varda returns to the podcast with her charming little love story about a happy guy, his happy wife, and his happy mistress.  It’s all very nice and sweet.  No problems at all.  Nope.  It’s all …

David Cronenberg just might be the only director capable of adapting William S. Burroughs’ drug-fueled descent into paranoia, isolation, murder, conspiracy, hallucination, depravity, and… self-actual…

Things get dark this week, noir and otherwise in Nicholas Rey’s brooding and prescient look into a doomed and toxic relationship. Humphrey Bogart makes his first appearance on the podcast with one of…

Our first Cannon Group movie!!  And it’s the sequel to Godfrey Reggio’s 1983 art house documentary that cuts artfully shot footage to the pace of a rhythmic Philip Glass score.  But Chuck Norris or C…

The romantic misadventures of the continental European upper class of the nineteenth century?  Making use of expertly-machined narrative devices that play with pattern, coincidence, and repetition? S…

This week we are re-joined by filmmaker Scott Sawitz (Save State) to discuss Jean-Pierre Melville’s beautifully bleak WWII French resistance film.  Are we going to get a film drenched in that Melvill…

Is it bad because it’s a theatrical follow-up to a television phenomenon that famously went of the rails, or does David Lynch’s prequel somehow manage to get everything back on track.  Opinions are d…

It’s time to hit the rails and Meridith and Michael from the Going Over Our Freds Podcast (@goofpodcast) are hear to take us on a ride to discover the real America.  We’re watching Preston Sturges’ h…

Two girls rampage their way through an allegory-laden modern city steeped in its own hypocrisy and decadence, indulging in everything “bad” in a feature-length gesture of seeming nihilistic hedonism.…

Kevin Allison of the podcast Risk!, The State, and so much more returns to the podcast with his selection of Laurie Anderson's atmospheric exploration of death, mourning, acceptance, dogs, mothers, t…

Dracula needs… you guessed it. But specifically he needs the blood of a virgin. But where to find a virgin in the modern world? If you found this joke/premise both funny and erotic, have we got a fil…

Acclaimed martial arts director King Hu’s tale of court intrigue, assassination, loyalty and betrayal is long-lauded as the seminal wuxia film.  As the English-speaking internet is oddly silent about…

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…

D. A. Pennebaker and his documentary crew capture the scene of the century, as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Who, the Mamas and the Papas and a host of other rockers take the spotlight during and s…

A young Vincent Cassel burns with a raw intensity in Mathieu Kassovitz‘s day-in-the-life account of three young men bristling against the cycle of poverty and violence that society has both trapped t…