Culture

New Oxford Windrush generation exhibit opens for Black History Month 

Amidst recent political tension provoked by the government’s refusal of slavery reparations to the Caribbean, this year Black History Month is celebrated uniquely in Oxford. The inaugural exhibition at...

“There’s a play in that”: interview with ‘The Gang of Three’ playwright Robert Khan

It’s Budget Day as I sit in the foyer of the Oxford Playhouse. Down...

‘Celebrity Traitors’ season two: Complex and compelling

Reality TV series The Traitors has returned with its celebrity version and has topped viewing charts for a second time. People are hooked on the show where logical reasoning and random chance are simultaneously at play, in a game full of drama, tension, and cliffhangers.

Oxford’s art scene: A picture still being painted

Who gets to make art, who gets to see it, and whose art history...

The Pitchfork Disney Preview – ‘a play of delight and disgust’

The Pitchfork Disney shows at the BT Studio this week

Create and destroy

“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge” Mikhail Bakunin

The Human Impulse

Investigating the social and biological imperatives behind art

Sexualisation in music: liberation or objectification?

Art and creative expression have always made up our social and sensitive nature, from telling stories, to performing primal dances, to painting scenes of human experience on cave walls.

Why do we write?

We write for ourselves, for the reader, and for wider society.  And I think that’s probably a good enough reason to write an article for Cherwell.

Enron Preview – ‘financial collapse made tangible’

A preview of the Theatre Goose and Sour Peach Productions' play at the Oxford Playhouse this week.

Projections of time: film and fashion

The importance of costumes in heralding new trends and evoking the past

Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde

The Barbican displays different kinds of ‘modern couples’ in an immersive blend of love and art

Beautiful Boy review: powerful, painful, poignant

Beautiful Boy is unlikely to have an unintentional glamorising effect. We witness the oblivion of being high before the inevitable crash down to a deeper and darker place.

Review: Antony and Cleopatra – a star-studded Shakespeare

Lawrence Li is impressed by the National Theatre’s opulent imagining of a Shakespearean classic

Hard to Be-Leave – Brexit: The Uncivil War

If you're looking for a grown up perspective on Brexit, Channel 4's political docudrama leaves much to be desired

The psychology of an evil stepmother

Is this classic archetype a thing of the past?

The anxiety of envy

"Big names dominate the industry, and yet their fiction feels incredibly same-y."

Fast Film: In a Lonely Place unites noir tradition with painfully real romance

Humphrey Bogart is a man addled by loneliness in this cinematic masterclass of subtlety and allegory.

“Look what you made me do”: Taylor Swift’s reinvention

The reinvention of her ‘reputation’ is not a change of character nor a sudden shift in her attitude to the spotlight. The Reputation era was simply a rebranding of sound, lyricism, production and image which worked to provoke her audience and, ironically, sustain her reputation.

Review: The 1975’s latest album falls short

Some robotic pretentious waffle. Some cynical love songs. Some good hooks, a few nice bridges. Rinse and repeat for an album for an identikit album, with a dozen else out there the same.

John Frusciante: Water under the bridge

A profile of the reclusive virtuoso

2018’s Cultural Highlights

Amber Sidney-Woollett recaps a year in culture

So that’s how Bandersnatch works, but did it snatch our respect?

From a design perspective, Bandersnatch falls into a lot of traps. Choices are quite infrequent and always binary, whereas it's standard for most interactive fiction games to allow you to choose almost every line of character dialogue. Isabella Welch discusses whether Bandersnatch is revolutionary or just manufactured hype on part of Netflix.

What’s on: Txking Oxford by Storm

TxkeOff and Land’s visit to Oxford will no doubt bring a new energy to the city, offering an elite clubbing experience to all its attendees with live artists performing

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