A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

We’re concluding our summer series, Lost Summer, with an episode dedicated to the actors that died not in old age, looking back at a long, storied career, but that were gone too soon. From tragic silent film icon Rudolph Valentino,… Continue reading →

Our Lost Summer continues, quite fittingly, with another David Lynch film: in our August espresso, Alan and Sam talk about Lynch’s most ’90s nightmare, Lost Highway, in which murder, mobsters, Mystery Men, Patricia Arquette (with black hair) and Patricia Arquette… Continue reading →

Some things are sadly lost: rolls of film crumble, TV programmes are never recorded, studios choose not to distribute a film. And then there are the cultural artefacts that come from a context so toxic, they are consigned to the… Continue reading →

Our Lost Summer started with an episode in honour of David Lynch, the artist and director who’s been an inspiration to us here at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture. After last month’s espresso episode, in which Sam and Matt… Continue reading →

Hundreds of films and TV series make it onto our screens each year – but just as many vanish, some before they ever make it in front of an audience. The second episode of our summer series, the Lost Summer,… Continue reading →

Our recent podcast episode on David Lynch, marking the start of our 2025 series Lost Summer, prompted us to pick up where that episode left of: for two of the films we discussed earlier this month, Blue Velvet and Twin… Continue reading →

This month’s podcast kicks off our summer series for 2025: the Lost Summer is all about what we’ve lost – directors, actors, films – and what this means to us. We’re starting with one that is very close to our… Continue reading →

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:… Continue reading →

Does a killer title make for a killer movie? When Philip Kaufman adapted Milan Kundera’s early-’80s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being for the big screen, it made a huge splash at its release in 1988, drawing audience numbers that,… Continue reading →

Back in 2022, we did our first summer series: the Summer of Directors. The episode led by Alan focused on Robert Altman, the “grizzly-bear genius of American cinema”, as Ryan Gilbert put it in The Guardian. Back then, we discussed… Continue reading →