The Cinema Cafe

Serving Screen Stories Sweet and Savoury

Dish of the Day (A Long Good Friday Edition)


Just some film musings of a more succinct, spontaneous and sometimes seditious nature:

Friday, August 1, 2025

Currently available at Watch TCM (until August 10th):

Both tension and fear are at their zenith in Cape Fear (1962) with Robert Mitchum once again playing southern bred evil incarnate as he did in 1955’s The Night of the Hunter.

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Dish of the Day

Just some film musings of a more succinct, spontaneous and sometimes seditious nature:

Thursday, July 31, 2025

Tonight on TCM:

Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 magnum opus Apocalypse Now (the “Theatrical Version” reviewed here) has been canonised by its opening alone: perhaps the most hypnotically captivating introduction in the history of cinema.

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Dish of the Day

Just some film musings of a more succinct, spontaneous and sometimes seditious nature:

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Currently available at Watch TCM (until July 24th):

Imagine a dish like this married to a mug like Benny McBride... the naked and the dead.

Next up is Richard Fleischer’s little powder keg of a film noir Armored Car Robbery (1950), previously recommended here.

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Dish of the Day (A Lost Weekend Edition)


Just some film musings of a more succinct, spontaneous and sometimes seditious nature:

Friday, July 18, 2025

Currently available at Watch TCM (until July 21st):

One of Sidney Poitier’s most persuasive film roles occurs in the lesser known but exceptional cold war thriller The Bedford Incident: Hidden Gem #32 and previously recommended here.

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Dish of the Day (A Lost Weekend Edition)


Just some film musings of a more succinct, spontaneous and sometimes seditious nature:

Friday, July 11, 2025

Tomorrow on TCM:

After her breakthrough role in Joseph von Sternberg's The Blue Angel made in Germany, Marlene Dietrich made six more films with the autocratic director in the U.S. The Scarlet Empress (1934), previously reviewed here, is arguably the duo’s most accomplished.

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Dish of the Day

Just some film musings of a more succinct, spontaneous and sometimes seditious nature:

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Currently available at Watch TCM (until July 13th):

In 1966, one of the more challenging films to face off against the Production Code (mentioned in Exploring the Artefacts #3: Code Breakers) was that year’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (reviewed here) remarkably delivering all of the guttural force of its theatrical origin while creating a more intimate, and cinema appropriate, dynamic all its own.

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