Movies

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The rooms where it happens

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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.

It’s International Bunny Weekend, so grab your Easter nest and check out what we have for you in terms of trailers! To begin with: Matt once again revisited family memories and the impact these have had on his movie watching, in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees. Getting a shoutout in the post is the 1960 war film Sink the Bismarck! – for which, surprisingly, there is an actual, original trailer on YouTube!

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #103: Second Chances – Hail the Damned!

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Another year, another Second Chances episode: in this month’s podcast, Sam and Alan get together to revisit two historical pieces, though they couldn’t be much more different – one has decadence, deviance and Nazism, the other offers Hollywood mystery, Communists and dancing sailors. Yes, we’re taking a second look at Luchino Visconti’s 1969 film The Damned, the cause of something of a memorable, and traumatic, early movie memory of Sam’s, and at the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar! (2016) (which we also wrote about here), generally one of the less-appreciated films of the writer-director siblings – but perhaps one that is unfairly maligned?

And if Alan and Sam’s chat about fascists, fixers, murders and musical numbers has got you in the mood, why not check out these earlier Second Chances episodes?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #280: Running in the family

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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!

Myself, I’ve never been to Sarajevo. In fact, I’ve not been to much of the East of Europe. I’ve been to Bratislava, which has the coolest little pancake place. And I’ve been to Prague – which is almost a bit of a cliché, at least for my generation (which, as you may have guessed, lies somewhere between W and Y). At Swiss grammar schools, classes would go on what is called a ‘Matura trip’ (the Matura being the final exam), which teachers would try to make as educational as possible, while students would try to make sure would provide ample opportunity for partying, and pretty much the generic destination for a Matura trip in the early to mid-’90s was Prague. Plenty of education, plenty of culture, plenty of beer.

However, that’s not the trip to Prague I remember most fondly. Even though I did get my CD of the Blade Runner soundtrack there.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear

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.

Another month is close to passing, which means: another Shortcuts. Including, among other things, a few thoughts on the strange, delirious The Testament of Ann Lee, Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, and last year’s Dust Bunny, which may deserve more attention than it got at its release.

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

MattLeave 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

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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 19th-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

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.

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

MattLeave 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.

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

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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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