One Best Picture After Another #9: The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

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Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

6/10

When I first looked through the complete list of films that I’d be watching for this exercise, one of the titles that stood out was The Great Ziegfeld. There was one reason for this – William Powell. He plays the lead in this film and I’m a huge fan of his. Yet despite being someone who long ago fell for the man’s charms, I’d never watched this particular film. Mainly because, unlike the likes of My Man Godfrey, How To Marry A Millionaire and especially The Thin Man, it’s not a film of his that gets remembered and rescreened alongside those classics. Even among dedicated Powell-istas (Powell-ites? Powell-ians?) its reputation is that of a bit of a dud.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: All That Was East Is West Of Me Now

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Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

Earlier this week, the singer-songwriter and actor Glen Hansard died after a motorcycle crash. You could do worse than to rewatch (or watch for the first time) Once in his memory.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #107: Summer of Genre – Disaster!

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When it comes to genre, there is one especially that is instantly recognisable. The moment someone says, “This ship cannot sink/this building cannot burn/this plane cannot crash!”, you know you’re in a disaster movie. The genre flourished for a brief period in the 1970s, but it never reached those heights again: even if there is the occasional disaster movie these days, it doesn’t have the draw of the classics of the genre, and it certainly doesn’t have the same kind of cross-generational star power that seems right out of a ’70s Agatha Christie film. In the third episode of our Summer of Genre, Sam, Matt and Alan look at three undisputed classics of disaster movies: Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). How do these films hold up more than 50 years later? What made the genre tick, and why was it such a staple of Hollywood cinema in the ’70s? Why was its reign so brief? And what place has big-screen disaster in today’s movie landscape?

P.S.: For more on disaster movies, make sure to check out Sam’s Six Damn Degrees post on “Pandemic and Disaster in The Cassandra Crossing”!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #297: The Rise And Fall Of Jonathan Creek

Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave a comment

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

There’s something fun about discovering a show via word of mouth. When friends who know you well start asking if you’ve seen the latest thing on television because, in their opinion, it’s “very you”. And then the subsequent joy when you finally get round to watching it and discover that it is indeed “very me”.

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Shortcuts: July 2026

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We’re almost at the end of July, which for many of our readers (if the WordPress stats are to be believed) means that they’re at the height of summer – and what better way to escape the summer heat than to plonk down in the dark with a good film or book or game? That is, if we have any good films or books or games to recommend…

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Robots like us

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

In 1935, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestowed the Best Picture award on Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton. Does the film hold up 91 years later, and did Alan like it?

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Why, Chantal, why? A Couch in New York (1996)

MattLeave a comment

Oh boy. Do you know the feeling when you hear about a film, it’s got an interesting director whose other films you’ve liked, as well as actors that you’ve enjoyed watching in the past. Not only that, but the film sounds really interesting for one reason or another: say, it’s in an unexpected genre for the filmmakers involved. It’s risky. It could backfire. But hey, it’s always worth the risk, isn’t it?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #296: Two trips to hell

MelanieLeave a comment

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

What if. What if hell were a university campus. In R.F. Kuang’s most recent bestseller, Katabasis, grad students Alice and Peter battle their way through eight Dantean circles to bring back their deceased advisor, the charismatic Jacob Grimes. One of their recurring discussions: they have no idea what circle he could be in. Greed? Violence? They are all too petty, too small for a man of his brilliance, for an academic visionary of his magnitude. Sure, he stole his male students’ research and was handsy and vindictive towards his female students. And sure, he abused them all, but, you see, he abused them and in doing so he elevated them. Sure, he made them do things, but they did them willingly, hungering for his approval. Grimes was the sun around which they were in perpetual orbit. What even is a crime, when it serves the greater good, as surely the work of such a lone genius must?

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One Best Picture After Another #8: Mutiny On The Bounty (1935)

Alan Kuhl Graham1 Comment

Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

6/10

A year after It Happened One Night won the Oscar and Clark Gable is already back in the next winning film with Mutiny On The Bounty. Another triumph that reflected his popularity with audiences and critics in the mid-1930s. Or, to put it more bluntly, he was a Star.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Be he moth or be he not

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

What better way to spend a hot summer Sunday than sitting in a cool cinema and watching a 4 1/2 hour documentary about the Boston municipal government? Or a similarly long film about the inner workings of the National Gallery? Or, indeed, an angry and unexpectedly lyrical look at the US welfare system in the mid-’70s? Frederick Wiseman has it all for you, and much more beyond, as Matt found out in June when his favourite cinema did a Wiseman programme in honour of the late documentarian.

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