Movies

Stunning Hunts and cunning stunts: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)

MattLeave a comment

Is bigger always better? Arguably, that’s the main question the Mission: Impossible franchise has set out to answer, at least since reinventing itself in its current format with 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, directed by Brad Bird. Once you get the Kremlin blown up and climb up the Burj Khalifa like a real-world Spider-Man, where do you go? Well, obviously, you ride a motorbike off a mountain in order to parachute through a window of the moving Orient Express. You try to escape a sunken submarine that’s rolling towards the abyss, while torpedoes come crashing from their enclosures to your left and right.

Is this one-upmanship impressive? Undoubtedly. Does it make for a good film? Let me get back to you on that one.

Continue reading →

Six Damn Fine Degrees #236: Hardy doesn’t begin to describe it

MattLeave 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!

Tom Hardy is probably most famous for his hardman roles, Michael “Charles Bronson” Peterson, Britain’s “most violent criminal”, being just one of them. Ask people which of Hardy’s roles they first think of, I’m pretty certain that The Dark Knight Rises‘ Bane will come up, or “Mad” Max Rockatansky (who, admittedly, isn’t half as hardass as that film’s Imperator Furiosa), or perhaps his characters from Peaky Blinders and Taboo. It makes sense: Hardy is nothing if not an imposing figure these days, a far cry from the evil-yet-slender Patrick Stewart clone he played way back in Star Trek: Nemesis (not a recommendation, even for Hardy fans – or Star Trek ones, for that matter).

Frankly, though, as much as I like Hardy when he’s working with good material, he’s not nearly as imposing as the O.G. Tom Hardy: Thomas Hardy, the literary pugilist of English Literature. There’s nothing quite like the world of pain that Hardy can put you in.

Continue reading →

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Are you watching them, or are they watching you?

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.

It’s not for the faint of heart, as Julie writes in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees entry, but Nicholas Windig Refn’s Bronson is worth a revisit.

Continue reading →

Who’s afraid of MI6: Black Bag (2025)

MattLeave a comment

Six couples – three men, three women, engaged in various sexual and romantic relationships – are seated around the dinner table. All of them work for British intelligence. One of them has been tasked with finding out which one of the other five is engaged in traitorous deeds. The food, while delicious, is spiked with a truth serum. What else is on the menu? Fun and games – that will end up with a steak knife being used for something quite different than its intended function. The words that are exchanged are just as sharp. And this is just the beginning.

Continue reading →

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Cinema is imitation, twenty-four times a second

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.

This week, Alan took our Six Damn Fine Degrees feature on a trip to the 1980s, to the Pet Shop Boys’ feature film It Couldn’t Happen Here – a feature film dressed up as a music video, vice versa, or both at once?

Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Espresso: May 2025

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

It’s been a while since we’ve been excited about the Marvel Cinematic Universe here at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture – so when Thunderbolts*, the 36th movie in the franchise was released to largely positive reviews, we were curious: had the curse of middling, directionless Marvel movies been broken? Join Alan and Matt (for once recording in the very same room!) to find out their take on the super- (or should that be anti-?) hero extravaganza starring Florence Pugh leading a team of characters from a range of other films and TV shows in the series, from Ant-Man and the Wasp to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. What did Thunderbolts* get right? Where did it step wrong? And what does it mean for the future of the MCU – which is set to continue with this year’s Fantastic Four: First Steps and next year’s Avengers: Doomsday, a film certain to attain the superhero casting singularity, seeing how it will feature pretty much every actor who has ever even heard the word “marvel” uttered?

Continue reading →

Six Damn Fine Degrees #234: The Pet Shop Boys’ It Couldn’t Happen Here

Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave 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 the height of their international success, the Pet Shop Boys made a movie. But following the collapse of their record label EMI, the production entered into a Rights Limbo. In other words, nobody quite knew who owned what when it came to the production, meaning no one could screen the film or release it on DVD or Blu-ray. It wasn’t clear whose permission they would need to seek and who they would need to pay to do it.

Continue reading →

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: And I would walk 500 miles

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 are our portals to the past? It could be our parents’ attic, or our boxes of music and video tapes (for which we might not even have any devices to play them on any more), or any other collection or archive. To find out more about Sam’s portals to the past, check out his Six Damn Fine Degrees post. And, since Vertigo represents one of Sam’s most-used such portals, here’s the original trailer for Hitchcock’s classic.

Continue reading →

Forever Fellini: Intervista (1987)

MattLeave a comment

And there we are: the final film on Criterion’s Essential Fellini box set, Intervista. It’s not Fellini’s final film: the director would go on to make The Voice of the Moon, released in 1990 and starring Marmitey Italian comedian Roberto Benigni, but even if the decision not to include that one was down to rights issues, Intervista feels like the right end point, seeing how it is about filmmaking, memory and finding that decades have passed and all of a sudden you’re an old man.

Also, quite literally and more than any other film by the director, Intervista is about the man himself: Federico Fellini.

Continue reading →

Six Damn Fine Degrees #233: Portals of the Past

samlinderLeave 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!


ELSTER
And she wanders. God knows where she wanders. I followed her one day.

SCOTTIE
Where'd she go?

Elster almost ignores the question as he looks back to the day.

ELSTER
Watched her come out of the apartment, someone I didn't know... walking in a different way... holding her head in a way I didn't know; and get into her car, and drive out to...
(He smiles grimly)
Golden Gate Park. Five miles. She sat on a bench at the edge of the lake and stared across the water to the old pillars that stand an the far shore, the Portals of the Past.
Sat there a long time, not moving... and I had to leave, to got to the office. That evening, when I came home, I asked what she'd done all day. She said she'd driven to Golden Gate Park and sat by the lake. That's all.
Continue reading →