Random Acts of Cinema

Paul Newman plays a literary baseball player who is the reluctant friend of a dying catcher. And he doesn't like paying taxes. And it's in a live made for tv movie from the 50s that was collected and presented by a PBS affiliate in the 80s before it was given the Criterion treatment. And it's named after a line in a country song. *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a ran...

Pedro Almod ó var returns to the podcast for his final (for now?) directorial entree (that we've reviewed) to the Criterion Collection.  Is his foray into psycho-thriller a welcome maneuver away from his female cast-led, queer-gaze, sexy, soapy, campy, farcical roots?  Or… did he somehow just manage to do it all at once!  How can all of these even work? (That's a trick question.  Of course it work...

A sumptuous period piece directed by David Lean and featuring noted star of stage and screen Alec Guinness?  That must mean... Dickens?  This is, apparently, one of the most beloved British films ever made.  Well, let us be the judge! *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our merch store .  T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers, and more! If you'd like to watc...

Her beauty brought powerful men down to their knees.  Her freedom brought down nations.  But how long can a woman flaunt the proprieties of Victorian Europe before she herself becomes a morality tale for the age?  Max Oph ü ls' lavish biopic of legendary dancer, mistress, and all-together provocative personality struggles with these very ideals... in gorgeous Cinemascope! *Come support the podcast...

Ben Franklin. Rocky. Gritty. Tracy Lord. C.K. Dexter Haven. Macaulay Conner. Sounds like this story is set in Pittsburgh.  *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our  merch store .  T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers, and more! If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Max Ophüls' Lola Montès (1955).

Two. White. Guys. Break. Down. Spike. Lee's.  Do. The. Right. Thing. In. 2026. Did we just nail it?   No.  But we try our best. Oh, and we forgot to mention that Radio Raheem's LOVE/HATE monologue is an adaptation of Robert Mitchum's serial killer preacher sermon from Night of the Hunter.  We're pathetic. *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our  merch st...

Orson is back!  But this time it's with a notorious film in which he struggled with the studio to realize his true vision… you know what?  Let's just say it's an Orson Welles' film.  A group of filmmakers and film historians gave themselves the task to dissect the various edits and versions of the film to attempt a construction of Welles' original vision.  Is it a long lost masterpiece?  Or is not...

This week we are joined by Mark Covino, co-director of  A Band Called Death (2012), to discuss Cornel Wilde's surprising independent Most Dangerous Game riff, pitting a group of Africa. Hunters in 19th-century South Africa against a colonial game hunter.   *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our  merch store .  T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers, and more...

Ah, young summer love.  So passionate.  So naive.  Never to last.  Never has this been more poignantly explored than in Ingmar Bergman's "Summer" films.  And perhaps this story of Monika and Harry running away from their lives to beaches and islands of Sweden does this at his most direct. *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our merch store .  T-shirts, h...

Imagine a movie directed/edited/starring Orson Welles as himself commenting on the making of this very movie while he wears big hats and capes, smokes giant cigars, DOMINATES heaping plates of raw oysters, does some magic tricks, constantly shows off his gorgeous girlfriend, and monologues about the nature of art and immortality… and all the while the whole movie is about someone else. Sounds fake...

We've scoured our movies this season from Lost in America (1985) to Playtime (1967) and everything in between for the best of the best.  That's right: it's time again to find out who will go home with the coveted Randy and who will forever suffer the indignity of being snubbed by the hosts of Random Acts of Cinema. *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our...

It's time again for the whimsical wanderings of a man lost in the urban sea of late 1960s Paris.  Kind of a modern Odyssey if you think about it…  Jacques Tati returns to the podcast, directing himself once more as Monsieur Heulot.   *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our merch store .  T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers, and more! Please join us next we...

It's a podcast double doozer!  Renoir and Kurosawa both adapt the same play, over 2 decades apart.  Mifune and Gabin play the same roll.  One is set in the source's original Russia and the other in Edo-period Japan.  Both are about hope and despair at the limit of human poverty.  Is there more to this comparison than… the comparison? *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a...

Hitch is back!  His/England's/Europe's first commercial talkie sets the tone and themes for a lifetime of adult-themed psycho-sexual thrillers.  Complicated protagonists, with questionable values, make questionable choices (all in good fun) until evil men force them to come to terms with their own sense of self-worth.  Sounds like a recipe for… blackmail! *Come support the podcast and get yourself...

Krzysztof Kieslowski returns to the podcast with his 1981 break-out smash hit (or at least it would have been if Polish censors hadn't suppressed it for 6 years and only then to release a heavily cut version).  It's almost as if there is one narrative where the film got released as planed, another where Kieslowski couldn't release it, and yet another where Randy didn't pick it for this podcast. *C...

1.  One.  Un.  Eins.  Welcome to the first episode of the Spirit Guides… is what I would say if we watched the films of the Criterion Collection in numerical order.  It took us nearly seven seasons, but we've finally been assigned spine number one: Jean Renoir's The Grand Illusion .  Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, and (scene-stealing) Erich von Stroheim, trace the lives of prisoners-of-war and their...

This week we are joined by special guest Max to (sub in for Mike and) discuss one of the great concert films of all time.  Music.  Death.  Controversy.  The Rolling Stones and the directing trio of the Maysle brothers and Catherine Zwerin find themselves in the middle of a decade-defining disaster: 1969's free concert at Altamont. *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a ra...

Huh… Apparently Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune made a few movies together. Wonder if this one is any good? *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our merch store .  T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers, and more! If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937).

Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll.  These are the things that you come to Random Acts of Cinema for.  Paul Thomas Anderson almost manages to reach our podcastly levels of hedonism and vice in his late 90s indie apogee covering the late 70s porn apogee. *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our  merch store .  T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers, and more! If you'...

Imagine a world where, whenever you think you are alone, there are always a bunch of dudes in trench coats quietly standing behind you and resting their hands on your shoulder.  And they can read your mind.  And they talk about you to their friends.  And sometimes they sneak into your dreams. Now imagine that there is nothing creepy about that and it's actually very reassuring.  And that maybe we...

Andrew Haigh directs a totally-not-boring movie about people talking about a marriage that seems find but maybe it really isn't.  But, like I said, in a totally-not-boring way. *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our  merch store .  T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers, and more! If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and r...

Did you know that the Beatles also made movies?!?  Yeah, so did we. *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our merch store .  T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers, and more! If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Andrew Haigh 45 Years  (2015).

This is not your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate's neo-noir western.  This is John Sayle's interrogating generational legacies of racism, corruption, compromise, and passion in a south Texas border town. *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our  merch store .  T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers, and more! If you'd like to watch ahead f...

Come listen to two woodworkers talk about this one guy who specializes in wooden bench-style kung fu. Oh, and Jackie Chan is in it also.  I guess he directs it too. But let's get back to this bench… *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our merch store .  T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers, and more! If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we wil...

"Once a lawyer, always a drunkard, and now looking like 2010s David Bowie."  So says newly-minted gangster "Rolls Royce" Wensel describing himself to the POSSIBLY love of his life, the daring thief "Bull" Weed.  And it turns out that this, the first American gangster movie (yay!), was also a love triangle (boo!). *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our m...