Certainly not the arty-ist neo-noir ever made, but it’s certainly the most Jean-Pierre Melville-ian neo-noir ever made.  And that’s more than enough to make this one of the most widely-beloved of all Criterion films.  Alain Delain (who sadly passed away between our record and the release date for this episode) brought Tokyo-cool, Parisian romanticism, and American grime to this epitome of the “cool assassin” film.

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If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (2001).

Can Master Wong navigate China into the 20th-century and past the obstacles of modernity, invasive western culture, and a whole host of outside threats to tradition?  Of course he can.  But even he’s got to admit: he looks pretty good in a boater hat and sunglasses.  Tsui Hark’s epic kung fu period action/comedy pits western powers, local corruption, modern technology, and the stubborn refusal to adapt against a ragtag group centered around a fighting school and its stoic martial arts master played by Jet Li.

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If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing’s Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samurai (1967).

When 20 or so upper class reveler’s end up at a post-opera gathering hosted by one of their peers, everything seems perfectly… polite.  But then director Luis Buñuel imparts upon them the one unbreakable rule of the film: no one can ever leave the well-appointed drawing room.  Ever.  What follows is a study in the logistics of human survival, depravity, and an allegory of the lies we tell ourselves as we sink into fascism.

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If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing’s Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China (1991).

“Bowie to Bowie… Come in Bowie…” So begins a completely unrelated piece of Bowie-related media that one of us wishes he watched instead. Come have a listen to find out which of us has the appetite (or patience?) for a Nicolas Roeg-directed 1970s dystopian science fiction film starring a beguiling and beloved pop star at the top of his game. 

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If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962).

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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If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976).

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 - 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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If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself (1980).

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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If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Keisuke Kinoshita’s The Ballad of Narayama (1958).

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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If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Luis Garcia Berlanga’s The Executioner (1963).  

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.  Join our  Patreon and support the podcast! 

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If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be celebrating the 6th Annual Rando Awards!

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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If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother (1999).