Movies

A Damn Fine Espresso: October 2025

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We’ve spent a lot of this year talking about the sadly departed David Lynch – but surrealist film doesn’t begin and end with Lynch, so we’re dedicating the October espresso podcast to one of the greats of experimental filmmaking: Maya Deren, who, aside from film, also was active as a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, writer and photographer. In particular, we’re focusing on her beautiful, enigmatic, eternally rewatchable “Meshes of the Afternoon”, a released in 1943, made by Deren and her husband Alexandr Hackenschmied (also known as Alexander Hammid). What makes this 14-minute short such an effective precursor to films ranging from Lynch’s Lost Highway and Inland Empire to more mainstream, genre cinema such as Inception and even arthouse video games?

P.S.: For anyone seeking out the films of Maya Deren: many of them can be found on YouTube, though not always in the original version and often with different sound/music. You can find one such version of “Meshes of the Afternoon” here.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: You wanna shoot a president?

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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.

Kings, knights, ladies in lakes – and a very particular sword: in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Julie revisited John Boorman’s messy but epic Excalibur.

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(This is not a) Criterion Corner: Evil Does Not Exist (2023)

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It would be futile to assign a genre to Evil Does Not Exist, beyond the most generic catch-all there is. Yes, the film is a drama, but what does that mean? To be honest, the more I think about Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s follow-up to the award-winning Drive My Car (2021), the less I can shake the impression that it is a horror film.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #255: Excalibur (1981)

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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!

“You can’t defeat people’s expecations.” ~John Boorman

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Movies and monsters and more, oh my!

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.

Remember Star Trek: The Next Generation? Matt once wrote a novel featuring the TNG crew – or was it fanfic? Read his Six Damn Fine Degrees post to find out more.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #97: The Horror

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It’s that time of year: the days are getting shorter, the shadows are getting darker, and the ghouls and ghosts are eager to come out and play. As is customary, we’re dedicating our October podcast to scary things – and this year we’re looking at the definite article in horror: The. No, that’s not a typo: for this year’s Halloween episode, we’ve selected three horror films whose title begins with “The”, namely Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976), in which an American diplomat suspects that his newborn son has been replaced with the spawn of Satan; Spanish gothic The Orphanage (2007), in which the children are decidedly not all right; and John Carpenter classic The Thing (1982), which pits Kurt Russell against what may just be the gnarliest shapeshifting creature from outer space. What makes these three horror films ones that viewers can return to again and again? And what other recommendations do our Baristas of Fear have for the scary season?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: One Preview After Another

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.

For this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Melane swerves towards the East, introducing us to two Chinese series she’s been enjoying – The Untamed and The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty – and their fan translations, showing us once again that there’s a wealth of stories many of us aren’t even aware of.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Love, Sex, Religion, Trailers

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.

If there’s Hitchcock talk to be had, Sam can’t be far away – and that’s also true of this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, in which Sam wrote about Hitch’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith (no, not the Brangelina vehicle from 2005, but the one starring Carole Lombard).

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A Damn Fine Espresso: September 2025

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Wow, Bob, wow: Twin Peaks forms part of the DNA of A Damn Fine Cup of Culture – if our name and logo didn’t already make that obvious. And yet, some of us have come very late to David Lynch‘s seminal series: while Sam had seen a couple of episodes, he had never watched the entire (original) series when we recorded the first episode of our Lost Summer on the late, great director and purveyor of surreal unease. So, what better opportunity than this summer (which included espresso episodes on Wild at Heart and Lost Highway) to remedy this over some cherry pie and damn fine coffee? Join Sam and Matt in the Red Room as they talk about Twin Peaks and how it holds up for someone who, for decades has heard about the series but not watched it. (You’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve adjusted the audio so that no one is speaking backwards.)

And if you’re in a Twin Peaks mood after listening to our September espresso, you may want to check out our fourth ever podcast episode, in which O.G. baristas Mege and Matt talk about the fantastic, and harrowing, Twin Peaks episode “Lonely Souls”.

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