Random Acts of Cinema
Each week friends Mike and Charlie have Randy (the random number generator) select a film for them to watch from the Criterion Collection. Then they discuss and review it for your listening pleasure. It’s a podcast about the love of film, expanding horizons, painstakingly cataloging the duration of every long take, and friendship.
- Update frequency
- every 6 days
- Average duration
- 80 minutes
- Episodes
- 328
- Years Active
- 2019 - 2025
1057 - Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)
Who would have thought that 23 years later we’d be having a conversation about how a Jim Jarmusch film starring Forest Whitaker as a samurai hitman for the mafia actually… holds up? Luckily we are j…
1172 - Mississippi Masala (1991)
Director Mira Nair plots a winding trajectory from Idi Amin’s forced removal of Asians from Uganda in 1973 to the struggles of a small-time owner-operator carpet cleaner in 90s Mississippi. All this …
443 - La Ronde (1950)
863 - Multiple Maniacs (1970)
Thank God that Peaches Christ and Michael Varrati of the Midnight Mass podcast joined us for our third jump into the works of John Waters. Otherwise our conversation would lack a noticeable measure …
951 - True Stories (1986)
This week’s guest Robert Saucedo, film-buyer of The Alamo Drafthouse, welcomes us to mid-80s, small-town Texas as commented upon by Talking Heads lyrics and the deadpan, obliquely humorous observatio…
666 - The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
Oops! We uploaded the wrong audio file this morning! To those of you who thought we recorded “an avant-garde art piece”: we apologize. We’ve since fixed it and this new version should make a little m…
999 - Matewan (1987)
The devil walks among us! And his name is… Chris Cooper? That can’t be right. Find out the real name of Satan by listening to our thoughts on John Sayles’ period drama about the fight for labor ri…
967 - I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978)
627 - The Game (1997)
This week we are joined by Cameron Kunzelman of Just King Things, Game Studies Study Buddies, and a host of other podcast projects as part of Ranged Touch in order to break down the layers of perceiv…
856 - Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
4th Annual Rando Awards
It’s time for our annual review of the highs and lows of a bunch of movies picked by a random number generator. And it turns out that this system really paid off this year, bringing us a truly eclec…
676 - I Married a Witch (1942)
Briana and Maddy of the Chapter One: Take Two podcast join us this week to discuss director René Clair’s screwball jaunt through the centuries as a mischievous and thoroughly evil witch (Veronica Lak…
905 - The Breakfast Club (1985)
This week we are joined by Michael Patrick Jann, director of the upcoming film Organ Trail and member of The State, to watch John Hughes’ all-time classic teen drama The Breakfast Club. We talk a li…
1061 - Minding the Gap (2018)
466 - In The Realm of the Senses (1976)
Things get decidedly erotically unrestrained in Nagisa Oshimi’s tale of a maid and her employer’s headlong dive into sex and obsession in 1930s Tokyo. And who better to have an open and mindful disc…
157 - The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
We’re joined this week by Richard and AJ of the Cult Popture podcast to try to wrap our heads around all things Wes Anderson: symmetrical framing, meticulous production design, quirky soundtracks, th…
LD136 - Arsenic & Old Lace (1944)
Things aren’t quite what they seem in the old childhood home of recently married ace reporter Mortimer Brewster’s (Cary Grant) old house over in Brooklyn. It turns out that his sweet spinster aunts …
844 - One-Eyed Jacks (1961)
A Marlon Brando western? Directed by… [checks notes]… Marlon Brando?!! Get ready for a wild ride of betrayal, passion, quick-draw dive-jumps, a fair amount of mumbling dialogue, and a whole lot of …
077 - And God Created Woman (1956)
How many times do you think that Mike will bring up Serge Gainsbourg in an episode about a movie that has nothing to do with him? The answer is one more than the amount of times that Charlie all-too…