The Barista Collective

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Shock and awe

Mar 15, 2026Mar 15, 2026The 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.

Origin stories are all over cinema – but what about the origin stories of nations? That is the topic that Alan wrote about in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees. Which does make it a challenge to find a trailer to post, especially if we want to avoid the overly obvious D.W. Griffith reference for, oh, lots of reasons. So here’s a trailer about the origin story of modern Italy instead – and it has Alain Delon, Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale too.

Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #102: Three Christies

Mar 7, 2026Mar 7, 2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

It’s been hinted at once or twice on A Damn Fine Cup of Culture: we do like a good whodunnit, and we especially like a good cosy – or sometimes less cosy – crime. So it’s high time we assemble all the suspects in the drawing room and pay our respects to the Queen of Crime: Agatha Christie. In keeping with our semi-regular series of episodes on noteworthy trios, our chief investigators Alan, Sam and Julie have rounded up three adaptations of Christie’s stories for the screen: Murder She Said (1961), starring the formidable Margaret Rutherford; Evil Under the Sun (1982), which not only features Peter Ustinov as Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, but a delightful cast that includes Diana Rigg and Maggie Smith; and the episode “Five Little Pigs” (2003) from ITV’s long-running Agatha Christie’s Poirot, in which David Suchet dons Poirot’s iconic moustache. Why do these stories have lasting appeal? How do Christie’s plots survive the adaptation into a different medium? And why exactly do they let Kenneth Branagh do those ghastly modern adaptations? (Now that is the real crime.)

P.S.: For more on iconic trios, make sure to check out these past episodes:

Continue reading →

Shortcuts: February 2026

Feb 25, 2026Feb 25, 2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

And already a month has passed and it’s time for our second Shortcuts, in which the Damn Fine gang shares their impressions on what they have watched, read, played, listened to recently.

Continue reading →

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Every time a bell rings…

Feb 22, 2026Feb 22, 2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

There are cities that were practically created to be on film: think London, think Paris, think New York. And definitely think Berlin, as Sam convincingly argues in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees.

Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Espresso: February 2026

Feb 21, 2026Feb 20, 2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

The show must go on: our recent podcast episode on Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead got Sam and Matt thinking. While there’s a long-standing link between the stage and the screen, theatre and cinema are nonetheless different forms of art. What makes theatre tick differently from film? What translates well from one format to the other, and what is lost in the process? Where could a lot of cinema perhaps learn from the stage? What films are there based on stage plays that survived the transition from one medium to another – and perhaps even benefited? And what movies escape the conventions of cinema and bring a dollop of theatrical magic onto the screen?

P.S.: For more theatre talk at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, make sure to check out last year’s March espresso, in which Sam talks to Julie about putting Clare Boothe Luce’s Broadway play The Women – famously made into a film by George Cukor in 1939 – on the stage. And for a discussion of Miloš Forman’s brilliant film adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, may we recommend A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #53: Exactly the right number of notes – Amadeus (1984)?

Continue reading →

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Running in circles

Feb 15, 2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Remember the film that Tom Tykwer, who’d later go on to direct Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, co-direct Cloud Atlas and co-create the hit TV show Babylon Berlin, became famous with? Julie certainly does. Make sure to check out her Six Damn Fine Degrees on Lola Rennt.

Continue reading →

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The smaller they come

Feb 8, 2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Matt revisited some of the time loop stories he’s enjoyed most.

Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #101: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Feb 7, 2026Feb 6, 2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Heads. Heads. Heads. If you have a moment, why not join us as we flip coins and somehow always end up with the same result? In our February podcast, Julie, Sam and Matt remember the late, great Tom Stoppard, in particular his seminal play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and especially Stoppard’s 1990 film adaptation of the same title, which starred Gary Oldman, Tim Roth and Richard Dreyfuss. How does Rosencrantz and Guildenstern land only a couple of months after Stoppard’s death on 29 November 2025? How does this quintessential piece of metatheatre translate onto the screen? Is it better to be alive or dead in a box? Can we give you love and rhetoric without the blood? And was there a moment, at the beginning, when they could have said no?

P.S.: For more on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (both the play and the film), and on why Roger Ebert was wrong about the screen adaptation, check out Julie’s Six Damn Fine Degrees #176 from way back in April 2024.

Continue reading →

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: V for Vigilante

Feb 1, 2026Feb 1, 2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

This week, we launched our new monthly feature: Shortcuts. Once a month, we will post quick write-ups about what the gang at A Damn Fine Cup has been watching, reading, listening to or playing. Our first Shortcuts took us from the poetic Silent Friend to the “chemistry and crass jokes up the wazoo” of goofball superhero game Dispatch.

Continue reading →

Shortcuts: January 2026

Jan 28, 2026Jan 28, 2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Considering how much we watch, read, listen to and play in any given month, it’s almost a bit sad that we only write about a fraction of these. So, starting this month, we’re trying a new monthly format: on the last Wednesday of each month, we will release a few shortcuts: quick impressions of films, series, books, albums, games, or any other damn fine cups of culture that we’ve enjoyed this month, whether they are new or we only just got around to them now.

So, with no further ado, here are our first Shortcuts. Enjoy!