I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Everybody’s heard about the bird

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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.

This week was Julie’s turn at the Six Damn Fine Degrees, and she linked literature, cinema and television in her post on Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White – which was adapted for the screen various times, as she writes, for instance in a somewhat botched 1948 film version…

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Criterion Corner: Into the backlog

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Oh boy… I’ve not posted one of these in a while – not because I haven’t been watching any Criterion releases, but because… I don’t honestly know. Most likely, it’s just this: sometimes the working week, and whatever else is happening in my life, leaves me with little time and/or energy to sit down and write a post, even if it’s one I’ve been wanting to write. And then a week passes, two weeks, a month, another one – and I’ve missed the moment.

But: while I cannot do these two films justice in full-length posts, I still remember enough about my reactions to them that I can give you my impressions. And if these make you curious, all the better!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #283: The Woman in White

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!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: This is the end, my only friend

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.

This week saw the start of a new series called One Best Picture After Another: Alan’s revisiting every single Best Picture Academy Award winner! Yes, you’ve read that right: over the coming months and even years, he will be watching, and writing about, each film that won the Oscar for Best Picture, and on Monday he started with the 1927 winner Wings. Sadly, this trailer isn’t the original – were there even trailers back then? -, but it’ll give a good idea of what Wings is all about.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: April 2026

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While we do post articles about video games occasionally, the medium is pretty much underserved by A Damn Fine Cup of Culture’s podcasts – but we are hoping to remedy this at least somewhat with this espresso podcast: our guest for April is Johanna Pirker, computer scientist and educator at Graz University of Technology and the Technical University of Munich. In 2025, Johanna published her book The Game is On (currently only available in German, but there are plans for an English translation – and a Thai version is in the works!), in which she talks about the revolutionary potential of video games. Join Matt as he talks to Johanna about her work, her book, and about video games, from Johanna’s earliest memories of playing Prince of Persia on her father’s PC to more recent developments in the medium and art form.

For more from Johanna, make sure to check out her website and YouTube channel. Also, we’ve previously written about two of the games Johanna brings up in the podcast: Journey and Dear Esther.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #282: The BBC Radio Lord Of The Rings Part Three: Stephen Oliver, The Composer For The King

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!

I think many people remember the first time that they discovered music that really fired the imagination. Music that wasn’t just the signature to a tale, but an integral part of the experience. If you wanted to imagine the other worlds of a tale – just a few bars of a theme and your mind begins to inhabit a whole new universe.

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One Best Picture After Another #1: Wings (1927)

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?

Many years ago a movie journalist gave me a very good insight into the type of films that win the Best Picture Oscar. The winner, they argued, will tend to be the film that best reflects the type of film Hollywood – at that time – wants to be making. Not necessarily the films that they know they need to make in order to bring in the money, nor the most technically adventurous or innovative. Nor even the most critically acclaimed. It’ll be the film that the Academy voters working in the industry look at and think: “Yes! That’s the type of film I wanted to make when I chose this career.”

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Space, Above and Beyond

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.

This week, Matt came back from outer space, briefly, to report on his Virtual Reality adventures in No Man’s Sky, a game that boasts a universe with (checks notes) 18 quintillion possible planetary systems?! No wonder some people say that video games have become too big.

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One Best Picture After Another: Overture

Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave a comment

Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – our new fortnightly blog where Barista Alan will attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. Before it all begins in earnest tomorrow, here’s his explanation as to why he embarked on this madness.

When it comes to the Academy Award for Best Picture, there’s an adage that goes: “The right pictures get nominated, the wrong picture wins.” And while you could easily do a very long-running blog on all the amazing films that didn’t get close to even a nomination, I think there’s some truth in that. Especially when it comes to the great injustices of the Award’s history, it is almost always framed in terms of a nominated film that is now revered as a classic losing out to a film that is now almost unheard of.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #281: Mélusine: The fantasy romp that’s really about complex trauma

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!

The past and the way it influences the present featured strongly in the last two instalments. Being from Vienna, I very much enjoyed and related to Matt’s dive into his trip to neighbouring Prague. I’m even a little sorry that I’ll now proceed to wrench this theme of past and present onto a completely different track.

Let me take you back to the year 2005 and a release that you probably missed because there was so much else going on.

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