Random Acts of Cinema

22/07/2024

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 fragile masculinity of the perpetually dissatisfied narcissists that demand their attentions. Two such long-suffering women are played by Nathalie Baye and Isabelle Hubert as entirely pragmatic and fully self-aware Parisian women coping with the surprisingly similar needs of lovers, pimps, johns, and… cattle.
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16/07/2024

Kabuki and 1950’s studio style combine in Keisuke Kinosh*ta’s lavish and heart-wrenching account of a rural Japanese family planning for and coping with the responsibilities and struggles of ubasute - a village’s custom to carry elderly family members to a mountaintop in winter and abandon them. Gorgeous set and production design add a compelling dynamism to an otherwise carefully plotted family drama.
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08/07/2024

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 managed to slip past Franco’s censors to show us a man slowly, haplessly, and inevitably lured with only the best intentions to utterly compromise his moral values. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to be suckered into doing it.
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02/07/2024

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 films.
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24/06/2024

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 find one another in Barcelona.
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22/06/2024

The latest episode of Are You Friedkin Kidding Me?!?! is live on our Patreon! This time we go all the way back to the beginning! It’s 1962. It’s a scrappy little documentary that tackles a big issue. It’s The People vs Paul Crump!

17/06/2024

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 release political prisoners. Corruption, torture, murder, and terror - all sponsored and plotted out by American “advisors” - are exposed in this chilling procedural.
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10/06/2024

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 a highly cinematic exploration of one man’s polite decent into maddening frustration. And we’re joined by Derrick Scocchera to help find our way back uptown.
Listen to this episode then pop over to the to watch short film It’s Always Something!
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05/06/2024

You just gotta keep on livin, man. L I V I N. Party tonight at the Moon Tower!

03/06/2024

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 comedy hijinks. It’s not the banging soundtrack. It’s more that all this combines to present to its film going audience a hyper-specific and long-lost subculture unlike any presented in the vast offerings of films tackling the lives of high school students.
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28/05/2024

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. So the lovable Tramp himself, Charlie Chaplin, decided to portray him in a movie. What’s his light-hearted take on this unexpected premise? Human society is diseased and nothing matters. In a funny way, though.
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20/05/2024

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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13/05/2024

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-time classic account of the sailing and sinking of the Titanic is far more than simply a blueprint for later, better retellings. It may very well set the high watermark for them all.

06/05/2024

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, a little crime, and all the grimey Pennsylvania you can handle. Understated and sublime; American independent cinema by a singular filmmaker who was way ahead of her time.
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29/04/2024

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

26/04/2024

Nick Nolte! Shaq! William Friedkin!
Are You Friedkin Kidding Me?!?!
That right it’s Friedkin’s College Basketball drama, only on our Patreon!

22/04/2024

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 trains. That’s one of his things, right?
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15/04/2024

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 made in the 1940s, it’s directed by podcast-favorites Powell and Pressburger, and it’s actually excellent.
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08/04/2024

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 Jake from the Never Did it podcast as we race across the globe in search of a potential antidote to Moonraker (which Charlie still thinks is a very good old man spy caper for some reason).
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01/04/2024

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 sub-castes of clowns whose insecurities, addictions, and lack of talent lock them in a perpetual rut of demeaning gigs, black-out benders, and petty jealousies. But one stands apart: Shakes. Perhaps the most talented and definitely the most alcoholic and self-sabotaging of them all.
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26/03/2024

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 more human). You know: it’s your basic Jack and the Beanstalk meets Avatar situation. With better (by which I mean funkier) music.
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18/03/2024

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. But since Edward Yang directed it, somehow it’s all beautiful.
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12/03/2024

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, and watch the sparks fly as they bicker, backstab, and try to make “reality” look fun for the audiences back home. That time was 1991. Those celebrities were John Lurie, Jim Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe, and Dennis Hopper. They made 6 episodes. Bravo never explored this format further.
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04/03/2024

Brett Morgen’s expressionistic documentary seeks to sidestep the question of “which is the real David Bowie?” and instead sees the creation of his personas as just one strategy used by the performer to craft a life of continuous artistic challenge and innovation. “Reinvention” isn’t so much a gimmick used to promote album and ticket sales as it is the inevitable path of a creative life. Oh, and it’s beautiful and the music is good. Freak out!
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26/02/2024

Director Jacques Becker’s belle epoque period drama about gangsters sets their lives on such a delicate balance between honor death that the eponymous pretty blonde is all it takes to bring it crashing down. Would you say a “love quadrangle” or a “love square”?
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19/02/2024

Indie director Melvin van Peebles’ one film for Columbia Pictures pointedly slams against the dictates and standards of studio filmmaking with his Godfrey Cambridge-starring vehicle about a white bigot who wakes up black and finds himself in a world that no longer tolerates his existence.
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19/02/2024

Come listen to us talk about some films that aren’t Criterion movies on the great Never Did It podcast.

‎Show Never Did It, Ep 1979: Real Life and Moonraker, with Mike & Charlie from Random Acts of Cinema - Feb 15, 2024

12/02/2024

Just in time for February: it’s... Random Acts of Cinema’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Take me away from all of these possessives.
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10/02/2024

January’s Are You Friedkin Kidding me is out! Join our Patreon to listen to us discuss The Boys in the Band from 1970.
This is not a musical!

05/02/2024

An all-star who’s-who of mid-century Italian comedy (we assume) unite for a picture of staggering proportions! Our boys stumble and bumble their way through a meticulously planned robbery and end up stealing… our hearts. Director Mario Monicelli gives the world one of the great prototypes of the comedic heist.
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