Movies – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The History Boys

Mar 22, 2026Mar 22, 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.

In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Julie wrote about the kind of narratives that history lends itself to, for better and for worse. One of the books that gets a mention is Dan Jones’ The Hollow Crown – so here’s a trailer for BBC’s The Hollow Crown from a while back.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: March 2026

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

It’s the Return of the Wuthering Brides! For this month’s espresso, Alan and Sam got together to discuss two recent cinematic riffs on classics of 19^th-century literature, with both books penned by, and both films directed by, women: Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” (apparently the quotation marks are an integral part of the title, based on Emily Brontë’s novel, and The Bride!, directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, which builds on both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and James Whale’s iconic 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein. How do the two films succeed, as adaptations and in and of themselves? Where do they come alive, reinvigorating the original material, and where are they haunted by the ghosts of what could have been? So join us as we run across the wily, windy moors with Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) in order to do the Monster Mash with Frank (Christian Bale) and the Bride (Jessie Buckley)!

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

Mar 15, 2026Mar 15, 2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Murder Death Kill

Mar 8, 2026MattLeave a comment

What does our reading, and especially the way what we read changes over time, say about us? In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, that’s exactly what Melanie writes about. And (thankfully (ed.)) she brings up Murderbot in the process, so here’s a nice little trailer for the Apple TV adaptation.

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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:

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The Hole Truth

Mar 1, 2026MattLeave a comment

Last week was the end of February, which means that Wednesday was Shortcuts day, featuring quick takes by the gang about what they’ve been watching, reading and listening to recently.

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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.

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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.

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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)?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #274: Berlin on film

Feb 20, 2026Feb 27, 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!

At first glance, Berlin hasn’t quite been as cinematic a city as, let’s say, romantic Paris, foggy London, cosmopolitan New York or sunny L.A. However, its tumultuous history during the first 100 years of cinema has made it an ideal space for movies that used it as more than just a postcard background. Arguably, the number of times Berlin’s cityscape felt like an active participant in the plot has to be significantly higher than the myriad establishing shots of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben or the downtown zoom shot of the Hollywood sign used elsewhere.

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