Film

They find themselves together – still best friends, still ambitious and imperfect and stressed.

Rare for the teen drama genre, the show, much like its sketched source material, is taciturn like an actual shy teenager.

The Pacifist was put together by a team of recently graduated University College students. Matthew Hardy (2018, English) wrote the screenplay and collaborated on direction with Jack Rennie (2017, PPL).

What is the first thing that springs to mind when I ask you about the connection between a red phone box in the Scottish highlands, a crackpot oil multimillionaire from Houston, and a jaded and cynical negotiator who ends up trapped between the two colliding worlds?

A film that rests so prominently in the public’s psyche can be difficult to watch subjectively. The Godfather is nonetheless a masterpiece in its own right.

What links the superhero show Peacemaker with the work of 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?

Life, death, and birth are all present in Pablo Larraín’s Spencer and Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers. Both films address, in different ways, what the meaning of motherhood is.

We know that we ought to validate and cherish visible difference. Why is cinema struggling so much to catch on?

It’s no wonder that sequels have a, let’s say, less than stellar reputation when films like Grown Ups 2 exist.

Dorothy Scarborough delves into the tangled history and complicated present of the beloved genre.

Marvel’s Eternals, the 26th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was released to somewhat middling critical reception, despite largely positive audience scores. I think it’s a brilliant film, despite the considerable body of opinion that stands in vehement disagreement.

Over the first lockdown, my family developed hobbies...Mine was slightly more fun: I fell into a rom-com hole.

A lot of old movies are boring. That admission may cost me my credibility as a film nerd, but it’s true. But there are classic films that even my limited attention span can wholeheartedly enjoy, and very high on that list are the horror movies of Val Lewton.

Impending disaster. And yet little to nothing is being done about it. The film’s portrayal of a disaster that could be averted but is being ignored offers a clear message about the climate crisis to the audience.

While discussing the upcoming sequel to the Oscar-winning Spiderman: Into the Spider Verse, a friend explained her love of the first film: “I just didn’t know that animation could look like that.” 

It’s a strange feeling to stare into the void of a Zoom loading screen, waiting for a two-time Oscar winner to join the call. But that’s what I did one Sunday morning, counting the seconds until my interview with Cate Blanchett began.

Right now, you believe you are reading this review in Cherwell. This is your reality. Yet in the world of the Matrix films, that could not be further from the truth.

Despite the shocking nature of Titane’s body horror, what lingers with you on viewing are the tender moments, the value of human compassion and the overwhelming sense that it is a tale of love and of family. An ode to Cronenberg's Crash (1996) it may be, yet Titane takes the strange premise that there is a connection between sexuality and cars, and crafts it into a work that explores an extreme form of love without words. Ducournau asks: how far are we willing to go to achieve a meaningful (familial) connection, to love somebody, and where might this kind of love take us? We learn of Alexia/Adrien’s daddy issues early on, and see the character start to deal with them as she learns to bond with Vincent in a fatherly way, as opposed to dealing with her trauma through sex and violence. Vincent, on the other hand, uses Alexia/Adrien to fill the gap left by his missing son, beginning to resolve an issue he had never been able to get over (interestingly set up against the cold attitude of his estranged wife). They bond through increasingly tender moments of intimacy, and through a shared love for dancing, culminating at the climax of the piece - in a finale Ducournau curiously describes as ‘a very happy ending’, though I would personally describe it as biblical, and a little insane.

Mulholland Drive is a film as mysterious and sinister as the workings of Hollywood. Do not be put off if you cannot quite figure out what exactly feels so off about it all the time

Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those articles about how superhero blockbusters are awful compared to classic movies. No, I’m here to explore the weird commonality between Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute and modern blockbusters. Linking these different approaches to film will be a strange journey, but at its end lies an intriguing idea: that reality and fiction may be one and the same.