A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

They create worlds: Return to the Zone

Jun 18, 2026MattLeave a comment

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

Way back in 2007, the Ukrainian video game developer GSC Game World released Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, a game that some would describe as a diamond in the rough, while others called it masochistic Eurojank. The first Stalker game, based on the Strugatsky brothers’ classic sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic and influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky’s loose film adaptation Stalker, was soon followed by Stalker: Clear Sky and Stalker: Call of Pripyat. All three games were janky and brutal, offering not conventional power fantasies so much as gruelling expeditions into the Chernobyl exclusion zone surrounding the power plant at the centre of the 1986 disaster. They weren’t fun games – but they were unique, atmospheric, and different from pretty much all shooters at the time.

GSC Game World’s games weren’t for everyone, but they found a community of fans. A sequel was announced, then cancelled, until, in 2018, Stalker 2 resurfaced. The game was scheduled for release in 2022 – a schedule that proved impossible to uphold when Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. In spite of setbacks, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl finally came out in November 2024. Two years later, I got around to returning to GSC’s new version of the Zone: from the Strugatskys’ region pockmarked by objects left behind by mysterious aliens, via Tarkovsky’s wet, verdant purgatory, to the surroundings of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a region populated by warring factions and mutant creatures, and strewn with reality-bending artefacts.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #290: The Hydra on film (for Matt)

Jun 12, 2026Jun 12, 2026samlinderLeave 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!

Jason fights the Hydra (courtesy of Ray Harryhausen) in 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts (Video source: Movieclips.com).

Matt was right of course in his latest instalment: the fact that this series of articles, amazingly, is close to reaching its 300th iteration comes down to the fact that our handful of writers and podcasters just simply can’t stop coming up with free (and often wild) associations for the upcoming week: from John Garfield to Garfield the cat, from camp cinema to Bill Camp, or from Christopher Lee to Metallica. Every entry almost immediately begets a next one, sometimes going down completely unexpected avenues and joining personal favourites with life-long trauma, latest reviews with childhood memories or quasi-philosophical reflections with pulp explorations. Every post-recording conversation spawns the stuff for three more episodes and two new series on average. Our team of baristas has really become the Hydra on film, popping up with a new head each time one thinks the topic at hand has been exhausted.

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One Best Picture After Another #5: Grand Hotel (1932)

Jun 8, 2026Jun 8, 2026Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave a 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?

In 1930 a play called Grand Hotel opened on Broadway and was an instant success. Such a triumph led to a film adaptation, packed full of some of the biggest stars of the day, that struck box office gold, critical acclaim and eventually won the Academy Award. None of this was an accident: all of it was masterminded by MGM’s super producer Irving Thalberg.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: So Long, Marjane

Jun 7, 2026MattLeave 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.

Two days ago, we learnt of the tragic death of Marjane Satrapi, French-Iranian writer and filmmaker, perhaps most famous for her graphic novel Persepolis and its later adaptation into a film, also by Satrapi. If you haven’t yet seen (or read) Persepolis, make sure to seek it out – it is a story that is timely not only because of its author’s untimely death.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #105: Summer of Genre – The Benoit Blanc Whodunit

Jun 6, 2026Jun 6, 2026MattLeave a comment

We’ve arrived at June, which can only mean one thing – it’s once again time for a Damn Fine tradition: our summer series. This year, we bring you the Summer of Genre: four episodes, from June until September, each dedicated to a genre that is close to our hearts. And we’re launching our Summer of Genre with one of Julie’s favourites – the whodunit. But not just any whodunit: Julie, Alan and Sam have got together to discuss Rian Johnson’s Knives Out mysteries, from 2019’s inaugural murder mystery via 2022’s Glass Onion to last year’s Wake Up Dead Man. Since our part-time sleuths, part-time cultural baristas are big fans of the classical whodunit (for key evidence in this particular case, make sure to check out this March’s podcast episode, Three Christies, featuring the same star-studded cast), Johnson’s modern-day riffs on the clasical format are the logical next step. But will our intrepid trio exonerate Johnson and his private detective Benoit Blanc, or will they reveal their unquestionable guilt once and for all?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #289: The many faces of A Damn Fine Cup

Jun 5, 2026Jun 12, 2026MattLeave a comment

I’ll freely admit to it: sometimes when I follow Julie in our ongoing associative chain, it can feel quite daunting – the reason being that Julie is just such a treasure house of knowledge when it comes to cinema. Not that I’m a slouch in this department, or at least that’s what our yearly results at the best local cinema quiz suggest – but it doesn’t compare to Julie. Because Julie reads so goddamn much about films, actors, directors, studios. And here I am, an avid reader who, nonetheless, barely ever reads any non-fiction books. I have some memoirs of directors and actors standing in my bookshelf, but if push comes to shove, I’ll grab a novel over anything that looks like it comes from the Land of Non-Fiction. So, if Julie goes before me in our Six Damn Fine Degrees series (which is soon approaching its 300^th instalment! how crazy is that??), I know that I’m following our resident professor of filmology and filmography, the woman who knows why Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon is a pack of porkies. She’s the one who can write a post such as last week’s about screen icon Elizabeth Taylor and how her private life, her public persona and her work in cinema formed a very particular blend.

I’m the guy who can take one of Julie’s well-read, heartfelt posts about actor John Garfield and, going from the sublime to the ridiculous, follows up with a post about a certain orange, lasagna-loving fat cat.

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Criterion Corner: The Trial (#1191)

Jun 4, 2026Jun 5, 2026MattLeave a comment

“Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.”

Back when I went to school, it was clear that, at some point, we would be reading something by Franz Kafka – and, at the time at least, chances were it’d either be The Metamorphosis (published in 1915), in which a man wakes up to find himself changed into an enormous insect, or The Trial (published in 1925), that foundational work of paranoid fiction. If I remember correctly, we ended up reading both, though from the time I mostly remember the 1915 novella, perhaps also because of that memorable MTV short from the channel’s “Feed Your Head” series. But while The Metamorphosis still has that deliciously fantastic angle of a man turning into a bug (admittedly, at my current age I find that premise less fantastic than I did as a teen), arguably it’s The Trial that feels the most universal – and its footprints can be found across culture and cinema.