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.
Every now and then our weekly Six Damn Fine Degrees series starts circling a certain topic for several weeks, and right now the focus is on Agatha Christie, her stories and the ways these were adapted. This week, Julie wrote one of her usual wonderful deep dives, this time on Billy Wilder’s film version of Witness for the Prosecution. Make sure to check it out!
Matt, meanwhile, wrote about the 2023 animated film Robot Dreams, which he found both delightful and strangely frustrating.
And what else do we have for you this week?
Sam: There were always a dozen of Hitchcock’s earliest films that I’ve seen only once or twice due to their questionable quality on DVD. Now Studio Canal has come out with a brand new release of ten of Hitchcock’s earliest films in their Blu-ray box set Hitchcock: The Beginning – and the result looks absolutely stunning, to say the least: fresh restorations have been made and new scores have been added – and the focus on his early sound masterpiece Blackmail with a new documentary by Laurent Bouzereau looks doubly tempting. I don’t know about others, but my Hitchmas has certainly come early this year!
Matt: Apple TV has some of the most interesting series of all the streaming services, and Severance is probably one of the most interesting series among them. At the same time, it’s been more than 2 1/2 years since the first season came out, and by the time the second season drops it’ll have been almost three years. I’m very much looking forward to more of this strange, surreal series that pulls off being funny and supremely creepy, sometimes within the same scene – but please, Apple, don’t keep us waiting this long all the bloody time! It’s not that I’m impatient, but it’s not a good model for sustained, engaging storytelling.
And finally, since we cannot really end the last trailer post before Halloween without some honest-to-god scares…
Matt: This one looks like it’ll bring good old-fashioned scares, competently delivered, but it also looks like it’s aiming to deliver something more complex than just another creature feature. In fact, the trailer’s focus on the effect the main character’s transformation has on his family reminds me less of other werewolf movies than of David Cronenberg’s The Fly. And having two strong actors in Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner makes me think that this approach could work very well, even if there’s a risk that they’ll lay on the illness metaphor a bit too thickly.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 