Preview Mode Links will not work in preview mode

Random Acts of Cinema

Oct 28, 2019

With our first random foray into the silent era, Harold Loyld’s comic romance The Kid Brother - officially helmed by director Ted Wilde - has a plot. It’s fine. Charming enough. But really it’s platform to string together a series of brilliant physical comedy set pieces that the lead actor stumbles, flails, and...


Oct 21, 2019

The first true B-movie entry into our randomized journey through the Criterion Collection starts with a mushroom cloud of a bang.  Spencer Gordon Bennett’s The Atomic Submarine (1959) follows the intrepid crew of the US Navy Submarine Tiger Shark as it sails to the North Pole to hunt down a...


Oct 14, 2019

We follow up last week’s selection with one of the Hollywood classics that inspired it.  Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows melodrama challenges conservative America’s expectations of age, class, and femininity as it follows an unconventional romance set against a backdrop of a quaint New England community....


Oct 7, 2019

Holding onto the dream of bourgeois America has never seemed so impossible, stupid, crass, and funny as in Jon Waters’ Polyester (1981).  Divine heads up a cast of Waters-regulars and boorish newcomers to tell the story of the dissolution of Francine Fishpaw’s family as it succumbs to adulatory, teenage pregnancy,...