Film

German Expressionist film: A beginner’s guide

With Robert Eggers’ remake of the classic vampire horror Nosferatu taking the world by storm, now is a great time to look back at the cinematic legacy that precedes...

Cherubs Grow On Trees: Atmospheric student filmmaking

Making short films is hard. You have anything between two and 20 minutes to...

Nosferatu: From Murnau to Eggers

Over one hundred years since its first screening, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of...

The Ultimate Picture Palace: A Profile

The Ultimate Picture Palace has been at the forefront of Oxford’s cinema scene for...

Feminist or Anti-feminist: Responses to Promising Young Woman

CW: sexual assault and rape, suicide “Every week, I go to a club, and every week, I act like I’m too drunk to stand. And...

Review – Zola

Melding literary mystique with a sugary, hyper-digital aesthetic, Bravo plays within a territory of cinema yet to be charted.

Review – Summer of Soul

Summer of Soul, which seamlessly interweaves original festival footage with contemporary interviews and news footage from the time, is truly brilliant. To say that the film merely shows the absolute talent of many of these performers would be an incredible understatement – the film positively resurrects them.

Too Horny to Handle? Demonising sex on reality TV

Watching Too Hot to Handle, you would think that we were living in the Victorian era rather than the sexually liberated society that many of us recognise.

Review- In the Heights

“No pare, sigue, sigue” (a Spanish aphorism which translates as “don’t stop, keep going, keep going”) is a particularly catchy recurring motif from the...

The Time-Travelling of Television

'The truth is that travelling to different time periods might even give us a better awareness of the idiosyncrasies of our own era – an era which, for all its shortcomings, could well be the golden age of the television series as we know it.'

UFOs, Space Baboons, and Masculinity

Somehow, “Pentagon confirms UFOs may exist” barely registers as news. It’s a shame, since our cultural obsession with the great unknown of outer space...

Accidentally in Love: Shrek Twenty Years Later

I watched Shrek for the first time when I was two years old. It quickly became a daily habit: my parents would plonk me...

Review – Spiral: From the Book of Saw

My friend and I arrived about thirty minutes late to see Spiral: From the Book of Saw in the cinema. It didn’t particularly matter....

Submarine: A Study in Soundtrack Writing

'Nothing is done by halves in this film, including the emotional intensity; when you’re watching, you feel at all times like you’re stuck in Oliver’s head, forced to hear all of his fifteen-year-old-boy thoughts and schemes. The soundtrack follows all of this perfectly, letting Oliver’s state of mind bleed through into the lyrics, which is the key to what makes Turner’s music so powerful and so fitting to the film.'

Tragic Female Friendship in The Pursuit of Love

'In everything from Little Women to My Brilliant Friend, Lady Bird to The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, women are offered a pretty clear choice: do you want to be sexy, or clever? Do you want to be stimulated, or happy? According to Mortimer, you can’t have both.'

Cannibal coming-of-age: Julia Ducournau’s Raw

'Raw is gross and disgusting, but it is also an important story about acceptance, about what makes us normal, and about our relationship with what we eat. Though the very idea of the film is sickening, disgust is central to the point it wants to make.'

The Epic Highs and Lows of Riverdale

'Riverdale is the teen drama to end all teen dramas. What started off as a fairly standard show about a teen murder mystery has evolved into essentially a parody of itself. '

WATCH3WORDS: Black Bear – Funny.Stifling.Psychodrama.

'Claustrophobic, erratic, and prickly all at once, Black Bear is an experiment in film which entangles its audience deep in its intellectual web.'

Dunkirk: the unknown soldier on screen

'The emptiness should be engulfing. Instead, when Nolan’s films work, they are spectacular.'

Seaspiracy: vegan propaganda or important warning?

Seaspiracy only offers one drastic solution: eliminate fish from our diet unless you are one of the 120 million who directly depend on it.

The Common DNA of the Snyder Cut and First Cow

To examine these films side by side would be insane. But insane ideas aren’t always bad ones, and I was curious whether Snyder might be on to something with this comparison.

WATCH3WORDS: Palm Springs – Exuberant.Poolside.Mayhem.

'By taking the well-known Groundhog Day storyline and injecting it with a healthy dose of sun, fun, and drug-fuelled nihilism, Palm Springs makes one of the dullest formats in the book suddenly enjoyable.'

Nomadland review: questioning American individualism

The ideals of rugged American individualism are a powerful national myth, so much so that when they are questioned, it can feel like an...

Donnie Darko: more than an average coming of age story

“I promise that one day everything’s going to be better for you.”