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

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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?

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

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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.

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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A Damn Fine Espresso: July 2026

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As we discussed in our second podcast episode of this year’s summer series which was dedicated to the Western genre, Westerns are, among many other things, a way of the USA talking about themselves. But not all Westerns take the same, serious approach to doing so, and the tropes of the genre – sheriffs, gunslingers, corrupt railroad barons, and many more – lend themselves to a different, more meta kind of genre: the parody. In this month’s espresso episode, Sam and Julie talk about Mel Brooks’ affectionate stab at the Western, Blazing Saddles. How does it fit in their viewing of Westerns? How does it hold up more than 50 years after its original release? And what is the state of film spoofs in 2026?

For some connected reading, check out Sam’s Six Damn Fine Degrees instalment on frequent Mel Brooks collaborator Madeline Kahn and her finest moments (including “I’m Tired” from Blazing Saddles). And make sure to keep following our series, the Summer of Genre, for more discussion of cinematic genres that we love!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #295: London Falling (Patrick Radden Keefe, 2026)

JulieLeave 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!

Note: while I conscientiously try to avoid spoilers in this short review: if you want to go in clean, you may want to come back to it later, as small spoilers on London Falling are inevitable in the text below.

Zac Brettler – Chrysa DaCosta / Doubleday via NPR
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Wiseman’s world

MattLeave a comment

If you had told me earlier in the year that one of my favourite cinema experiences this year would be a set of long-form documentaries about subjects ranging from political institutions through bureaucracies to libraries, galleries and fine dining, and that I’d not only go and see several such documentaries three or four hours (and sometimes more) in length, after finishing one I’d want to see the next one pretty much right after? I would have laughed in disbelief.

Well, call me a convert: a one-month curated programme of documentaries by Frederick Wiseman, who died last February, turned me from someone who had heard of Wiseman into a card-carrying believer.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: One K, Two K, Three K, Four

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.

Alan’s Academy Awards series continues with the Best Picture winner of 1934: It Happened One Night. (It probably isn’t that much of a spoiler to say that Alan liked that one. A lot.)

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #294: Make mine digital

MattLeave 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!

Most of the films running at my best local cinema are shown in digital format – but occasionally, after the ads and the trailers, there will be a slide saying something to the effect of: the following feature will be shown in an analog, 35mm version. Whenever that happens, I imagine that I hear a contented sigh from all the real cineastes in the audience. 35mm. None of those new-fangled bits, bytes and pixels. Real film: warm, grainy, as God intended.

Now, I consider myself a pretentious film geek with the best of them. But, honestly? I can’t remember a single such announcement that we’re about to see a film on, well, film rather than only a digital facsimile that didn’t make me think: couldn’t we have the digital version instead?

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One Best Picture After Another #7: It Happened One Night (1934)

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?

It Happened One Night is an Academy Award winning film that still has a high profile for a production made in the Thirties. It’s one of those movies that can be safely recommended to those who are interested in early classic cinema, and its the first film so far from all the Oscar winners that I was already a massive fan of.

But revisiting a few old friends is going to be part of this journey, and so it was joyous to dig out my own copy of this and put it in for the umpteenth time. And, unsurprisingly, it’s still brilliant. Rewatching it is also a reminder of why it’s hard to find anything new to say that hasn’t been said dozens of times before in the 92 years since it was a hit. This isn’t a complicated film: what it does is really quite simple. But it just does it so, so well.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Therwulf!

MattLeave 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.

This year, the United States of America are celebrating their 250th birthday. What better time to watch Netflix’s Death by Lightning, about the murder of President James A. Garfield by a delusional weasel of a man?

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #106: Summer of Genre – The Western

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After last month’s episode on the Knives Out mysteries, our Summer of Genre embraces today’s date and continues with that most American of genres: the Western, and the ways in which the genre is frequently used to tell, retell and revise the foundational myth of the United States of America. And since it would be silly to discuss this among jaded Europeans only, we’re bringing back a guest and Damn Fine friend for this episode: Daniel Thron, who’s been on the show to talk to us on everything from Steven Soderbergh via the films of Robert Altman and The Exorcist to the arid sandscapes of Dune, both Part One and Part Two (which means that you may just get to hear him again in a few months when Denis Villeneuve finishes his epic trilogy). Join us for a talk that starts with the classic, iconic John Ford western My Darling Clementine (1946) and then takes us all the way to 2007 for the revisionist The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and the darkness of the Coen brothers’ neo-western No Country for Old Men. How do all of these films tell stories about the ever-changing, ever-same frontier that is the United States of America?

P.S.: For anyone who can’t get enough of Dan’s voice, make sure to check out CG Garage, a podcast dedicated to the movie industry.

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