Culture

The Green Knight is a medieval movie for the Internet age. I don’t mean that the titular Green Knight appears to King Arthur’s court...

"Out from the November night an easy orange glow invited me into the Sheldonian. I trotted up creaking stairs to the top floor, into the jaws of death – the jaws of death being an archaically unintuitive seating set up. The seats on the upper stalls are just three big steps – if you arrive late, sidling along the upper rows in front of those already seated requires deft footwork and a lot of 'excuse me's."

"While Rooney wants to make it clear that these characters are made by a complex process of personal and structural factors, the characterisation of these effects comes across as largely typical liberal nihilism: evident contemporary issues are discussed but focus by and large as background. Brexit, climate change, culture wars and fame form a seemingly endless indulgent discourse with no real direction or purpose. Instead, there seems to be an obsession with providing binary opposites within her characters, which comes across as a litany of cliché. Felix is both bad because he watches hardcore pornography but is good in the fact that he likes and gets along well with dogs. Eileen presents her vulnerabilities through the online-stalking of her ‘sad boy’ ex-boyfriend, her tiny apartment, and meagre salary, while Simon can promise his traditional Catholicism, do-gooder job in the Irish government. Alice’s sexual voyeurism is linked to her financial position in allowing Felix to come to Rome with her expenses paid. Felix’s working-class cliché borders on the offensive, or serious ignorance at best, presenting a character who has to literally defend his intelligence: “I can read by the way… I’m not great at reading, but I can read. And I don’t think you really care anyway.” When these minor power-plays slowly unfold and catalyse at the end of the novel, involving a major confrontation between Alice and Eileen, a knocked-over chair, and a wine glass smashed on the kitchen floor, we’re left wondering what the entire point of these relationships was in the first place."

CW: sexual assault. For musical theatre purists and sceptics alike, Steven Spielberg’s reboot of West Side Story remains a hard sell. According to the naysayers,...

Paper Moon’s latest production, an immersive theatre experience called Cut, Paste, Enter. Took place this week at Modern Art Oxford. Ahead of their opening, Cherwell spoke to Chloe Dootson-Graube (Creative Director), Georgie Dettmer (Director), Grace Olusola (Writer), and Hannah Gallardo-Parsons (Sound Designer) about putting together this exciting new project.

"Conflict in God of Carnage is created through two groups of parents‘ apparent desire to resolve a falling-out between their children. Alain and Annette’s child has hit and broken two teeth of Véronique and Michelle’s child. However, despite initial mature airs, the adults soon lose any sense of moderation, and themselves turn into quarrelling children. This play is therefore an intimate descent into savagery."

'Overall, I very much enjoyed Please Clap. Experimental, and at the same time digging into the solemn secrets of celebrity and humanity, the fakery of the media and the forgery of façades, this was a show to be applauded.'

In the maelstrom of reinterpretations of misunderstood Homeric women and Greek tragedy revivals, the show’s lyrics stand out for consistently centring the core themes and questions asked by the ancient texts themselves.

Netflix’s popular and influential show Sex Education has received great acclaim for its honest portrayal of sexual interactions between secondary school teens. However, its...

COP26 has brought forth a multitude of images which embody the climate crisis: koalas clinging to rescue workers in Australian forest fires, polar bears...

Out of the Blue, an Oxford University a cappella group, has released its Christmas charity single for 2021. This year, the group is supporting...

There is a certain magic in the escapism that art offers, in our ability as humans to completely fall into worlds and emotions that...

Beth Simcock’s bright and colourful large-scale work The Zodiac lights up the exhibition space at Oxford’s Modern Art Gallery. A recent Ruskin graduate and one of...

Kid A and its sister album Amnesiac helped introduce electronic instruments to alternative rock, and were a risky sonic departure from Radiohead’s guitar-based and immensely successful OK Computer....

A shock decision by Spotify has fundamentally shaped the concept of the album in the digital age. Adele’s new album, 30, can no longer be shuffled as...

'I didn’t know how to articulate this at the time, but watching West Side Story I encountered for the first time a quality I’ve come to look for in great musical theatre: the distillation of complex emotion into song in a rounded yet deceptively simple manner. Here was a prime example of showtunes’ unique ability to bring human feeling to a higher plane.'

CW: Body image When I learnt that a new Barbie film is coming out in 2023, my first reaction was excitement. The batch of...

"Yet the message carried in this little soap opera bubble is nonetheless heartening: that the queer community is supportive and inclusive, and that for the very vulnerable, it’s often more loving and nourishing than the institutions and relatives that have failed to accept them."

"[...] it is these painfully truthful human relationships that elevate it from an evocatively written commentary on medical ethics to a truly perceptive piece of art."

2nd May 1997 manages to use a pivotal moment in political history to explore three very different relationships and the difficulties they face. It is performed with grace and humour, using the political events as a mirror that reflects the difficulties of each pair’s situation.