It’s finally August; the time of year when we tentatively place our umbrellas in our respective cupboards and venture out into the great British summer. And for film lovers, this can only mean one thing. That’s right, we throw caution to the wind and book our tickets for open-air cinema.

Up and down the country, thousands of people are perching themselves before vast screens, under the canopy of Britain’s temperamental sky and, optimism permitting, you could be one of them. To celebrate this mass act of faith, we bring you the five best outdoor venues with the most student-budget friendly prices.

What: The Scoop at More London

Where: London

When: 15 September – 1 October

http://www.morelondon.com/events_details.asp?ID=73

The sunken amphitheatre by City Hall will this year play host to what can only be described as a random selection of films. There’s high suspense machismo in the form of Oscar winning The Hurt Locker and heartwarming family animation in Pixar’s Up. There’s also Dirty Dancing, but the less said about that, the better. And it’s completely free, although it operates on a first come first serve basis so get there fast and hold firm to your seat.

What: Screenfields

Where: Manchester

When: Up to 9 September
http://www.spinningfieldsonline.net/app/whatson/spinningfields.cfm

Manchester’s first outdoor cinema and another free venue (unless you want to push the boat out and hire a deckchair). Highlights include Miyazaki’s beautiful Spirited Away and iconic romance in The Quiet Man.

What: Chichester Cinema at the New Park

Where: Chichester, West Sussex

When: 14 August

http://www.chichestercinema.org/film/804/My-Fair-Lady-FREE-OPEN-AIR-SCREENING-NO-NEED-TO-BOOK

If the upbeat romanticism of George Cukor’s My Fair Lady just isn’t quite enough for you at an indoor cinema, see it free in the Chichester Cathedral grounds under the stars – weather conditions and light pollution allowing.

What: Purbeck Film Festival at Corfe Castle

Where: Corfe Castle, Dorset

When: 27 – 28 August

http://www.purbeckfilm.org.uk

August Bank Holiday sees the screening of a youth orientated programme at Corfe Castle. Relive your childhood with the locally filmed classic Bedknobs and Broomsticks for £5 a ticket. Lets just hope the special effects haven’t aged too badly.

What: Conkers Open Air Cinema

Where: Moira, Derbyshire

When: 7 August

http://www.visitconkers.com/events/t/performing-arts-events/open-air-cinema-mamma-mia-87.html

If any film was made for an outdoor screening, it’s probably Mamma Mia. For £5 you can sing-a-long, laugh at the questionable vocal talents of the cast and hopefully have an all round good time in the National Forest.

Half of you, I reckon – the half with a ‘Y’ chromosome – must have seen the South Park episode Go Go God, where Richard Dawkins comes to the school to teach the theory of evolution. Mr(s) Garrison’s response – “if I’m a monkey, I’ll act like a monkey” – is to fling her faeces at him. This is humour at its cheapest, but it’s strangely satisfying to watch. Many who have been on the receiving end of Dawkins’ polemics feel that the biologist-turned-polymath has been flinging faeces around for the last five years. Live by the turd, die by the turd.

I apologise for the scatological start to this review, but bear with me a moment. You see, the trouble with the religion-science controversy in the 21st century is that it has hardly been a controversy at all. On a global stage, with primal emotions running high, it has all too often descended into a shit-slinging match. Fortunately, it seems, times are a-changin’. Last term’s excellent edition of the Oxford magazine Exposition featured an article charting the attacks on the New Atheism from within the scientific community. Tightly focused critiques of the methods and assumptions of the most prominent attacks on religion, they are almost unanswerable.

And now Marilynne Robinson, who won the Pulitzer Prize with her novel Gilead and the Orange Prize with Home, has walked into the debate like a seasoned UN negotiator entering a border dispute in sub-Saharan Africa. The first rule of conflict negotiation is to point out that there is no conflict, and this is exactly what Robinson does in Absence of Mind.

The springboard of her argument is that the polar opposition between science and religion is banal. “The great quarrel in modern Western life,” she writes, “is said to be between religion and science. They tend to be treated as if there were a kind of symmetry between them, presumably because of their supposedly Manichean opposition.”

Modern critics of religion either fail to define what they are attacking, or otherwise define it as a behavioural phenomenon. Even when they look at individual religious feeling, Robinson argues, they simplify it to a pathology, as though belief in God were a form of mental illness. This is a “hermeneutics of condescension”: “to condescend effectively it is clearly necessary to adhere to a narrow definition of relevant data.”

We neglect the experience of faith – what it feels like to be more certain of a transcendent belief than of one’s own hands and feet, as Cardinal Newman put it. “Scientific” atheist thinkers tend to dismiss it because their brand of rationalism is founded on the belief that a thing either is or it ain’t. If you can’t measure and objectify its existence, they maintain, it must be hokum. Robinson thinks that this approach is unscientific. Quantum mechanics and modern cosmology have shown that the fibres of the world itself are as fragile as dreams: reach out to touch them, and they slip behind you. If you can’t measure the position and velocity of a sub-atomic particle at the same time, you can ill afford to scorn other modes of knowledge.

Absence of Mind argues that reality is intensely subjective. The way things are is closely linked to the way we think and feel they are. Robinson wants the self – the way we experience the world around us – to be brought back to the heart of science. She calls for a science that embraces the full complexity of concepts instead of reducing them to generalisations and quantifiable phenomena. This means taking pre-Enlightenment – and even pre-Socratic – thought seriously. “In culture as in nature,” she writes, “there is no leaving the past behind.”

This is a profoundly powerful thesis. Like all the best works of philosophy, it brings you back wide-eyed to what you already knew. True, Robinson is not innocent of the odd volley of faeces-flinging, but her rigour and openness redeem this book. Like some vast sacred river, Absence of Mind wanders disconcertingly across the plains and massifs of world history, leaping over precipitous non sequiturs and bubbling out of unexpected troughs, but ultimately reaches its end with a calm momentum.

The tragedy of this book is that it is simply too difficult for anybody used to Dawkins’ prose style to digest. There were too many sentences where I understood every word and just couldn’t fit them all together. It’s a horrible experience. You sit there, and you move all the ideas around in front of you like a child with the pieces of some jigsaw puzzle, but somehow they won’t quite fit together and all you get is the vaguest impression of the picture. I felt like Cecile in Bonjour Tristesse when, faced with a single impossibly enigmatic sentence of Bergson, she flees in revolt from the whole world of seriousness and academic strain.

If you – like me – are not acquainted with the entire history of Western philosophy from Plato to Pinker, fasten your seatbelt for a turbulent ride through concepts you only half understand. Positivism, for example, seems to mean so many things in so many different spheres that it is almost meaningless. Three pages of clear explanation would be more welcome than the single word “hermeneuticization.” This is not really Robinson’s fault – she is dealing with a field of writing that bears as much resemblance to practical modern English as Cicero’s translations of Greek bear to contemporary Latin, a world where abstract nouns wind up doing horribly contorted things to other abstract nouns. Still, as a novelist she might have simplified her expressions without losing any of the richness of her arguments. Absence of Mind is only 135 pages in length, but it would be a quicker read if it were twice as long.

Anyway, buy it, read it, puzzle it out, disagree with it, misunderstand it (as I probably have), love it, despise it. A book like Absence of Mind is valuable not so much for itself as for how the world responds to it. It’s a book that’s worth hating.

The curtain rises to reveal Jeff Goldblum as Mel Edison, hunched over in his living room at 2.30am, rocking back and forth and muttering, ‘God… God… God…’. He is a man undergoing an existential crisis, bitterly unhappy and uncomfortable in the world, but unable to discover any one cause. His wife wakes and tries to comfort him, but his melancholy and his rage are unshakeable. He pounds on the wall of his neighbours, retches at the smell of garbage from sidewalk and is certain that he is about to lose his job in the midst of a recession. It might be advertised as a comedy, but in its opening moments, The Prisoner of Second Avenue seems nothing of the sort. Instead, it seems that the audience is in for an updated Ivanov for the 1970s, with laughs in short supply. Yet after a few minutes of Goldblum’s manic pacing back and forth and his unstoppably rapid delivery of lines, this revival of Neil Simon’s 1971 play reveals itself to be about as funny as theatre gets, albeit as black as funny gets.

The story revolves around a middle-aged couple, Mel and Edna Edison, who live alone in a New York apartment, their daughters having gone off to college. Their surname suggests a pioneering American spirit, but throughout the play, success or even optimism is nowhere to be found. Instead, they exist in a city suffering under prolonged garbage strikes, an unbearable heatwave and an enormous surge in criminal activity, and there seems to be no escape. As the recession puts their jobs in jeopardy and the water supply is sporadically shut off, innumerable and unrelenting waves of misery are lined up for the married pair. For these two New Yorkers, the American Dream has long gone stagnant.

In the midst of all this, Jeff Goldblum and Mercedes Ruehl are thoroughly convincing as Mel and Edna, sharing a remarkable chemistry that hints at years of marriage. Although the press has mostly focused on the show as a vehicle for Jeff Goldblum, this is undeniably a two-hander; both actors bring their own unique form of neurosis to their roles, and complement each other perfectly. And neuroses really does sum this production up. With Goldblum’s nervous breakdowns, whiney complaints about the air conditioning and loathing of his neighbours, the play would not look out of place in the oeuvre of Woody Allen – it shares much of his style of humour, and, more significantly, feels thoroughly rooted in time and place. From the old-school news reports to the understated costumes, the audience is transported straight to 1970s New York as it approaches bankruptcy. Yet while the period setting is subtle and convincing – due in large part to Terry Johnson’s excellent direction – its comedy, drama and underlying themes all have a startling contemporary relevance. Mel’s fear of unemployment is one that strikes a chord with audiences in 2010, and the trials and tribulations that he and Edna undergo are timeless, being struggles within themselves as a couple.

The play’s greatest emotional strength lies in its understated development of the relationship between the husband and wife. They bicker, fall out and don’t even touch each other for much of the play, but the sense is always there that theirs is a genuine and loving relationship. It is a realistic, unsentimental but ultimately tender portrayal of two people struggling to stay afloat in the unforgiving currents of urban life. While its wit remains bitingly sharp and intelligent throughout, the masterstroke of this production is found in its understated moments of pathos, culminating in an unexpectedly poetic and beautiful final image. It is a shame this play won’t be running for much longer – it closes on 25 September – as this is an emotional, witty and timely revival. See it before it disappears too soon.

The show is playing at the Old Vic’s Vaudeville Theatre. £12 admission for under-25s.

The setting is a weathered house hidden in Jericho. Inside, the floor is littered with upturned furniture, scripts, costumes (including a giant cat jumpsuit made out of velveteen). The lampshades are cockeyed to shed light on a makeshift stage and the strumming of an acoustic guitar floats down the stairs. I am in the creative lair of the cast and crew of the new OUDS Fringe production of The Master and Margarita. In the final days of rehearsal, I had the opportunity to sit down with the creative minds behind this latest stage adaptation of Bulgakov´s classic novel, co-adapters, co-direcotrs and actors, Raymond Blackenhorn and Max Hoehn.

What inspired you to choose this novel to adapt into a play?

Max: I’ve always wanted to do something Russian and I thought the book’s playfulness, its exuberance and humour were perfect for a Fringe show specifically. So many people love this book for its rich narrative that combines hilarious satire, a stark retelling of the Passion and a really touching love story at its core. It’s got something for everyone.

Raymond: We both had read the book years ago and loved it and wanted to do a show for Fringe. I thought the sort of anarchic character of the book was good for a Fringe show, it is good for late slot, Edinburgh atmosphere. I think it was a marriage of those two concepts….to choose a show that was suited for an immersive performance and also just the ambition of it.

How did the adaptation process work and what was the most challenging part?

Max: In a way the trickiest bits to adapt practically, such as Margarita’s flight over Moscow, have been the most fun because they really let your imagination run wild in thinking up how to communicate a particularly magical or complex part of the book on stage. What we have now, we had to redraft several times.

Raymond: We would just try playing it off of each other. We’d write something, do the scene, go back and change it. It was a great process. One person could think about just trying to write. And the other person could say, that’s not dialogue or that’s not playable.

What are the main themes of the story for you and for this production?

Raymond: Whenever you do a production you have to feel that you are making some contribution, that you are not just repeating someone else’s thing. In this sense our production is quite different from the existing ones of Bulgakov. More people should know about Bulgakov, more people should read it—it is about what it was like to be an artist at that period. Every moment every scene you are handing the audience something. I think it is very moving that this novel is so full of imagination and fun but then it is also so angry and bitter and it was difficult to write—what would it have been were it not for the society he was in?

Max: The key themes in the piece are the inner struggle within the principal characters to maintain faith in what they believe. We have a universal story of cowardice and truth in the retelling of the Christ story. This is mirrored in the Master’s artistic commitment to truth. For me there’s another motif in the meeting between Master and Margarita, which again is about belief in each others’ love and preservation of hope in spite of all obstacles.

In putting on a play where Jesus, Satan and Pilate are some of the main characters, how you feel that the play is addressing religion, spirituality and faith?

Max: The novel is about faith, but not specifically religious faith. Christ’s struggle is made all the more powerful because he’s presented as a normal, non-iconic figure who’s fighting for what he believes. Pilate’s inner struggle remains the focal point of the Jerusalem narrative, which runs against the Gospels, introducing more subtlety and helping us understand his position more. The attack on one objective truth that everyone has to abide by could be seen as an attack on both Communism and the Church (as an institution). But Bulgakov’s ideas are neither pro-Christian or anti-religious I’d say. Both evangelical Christians and Satanists have vandalised Bulgakov’s Moscow apartment in Sadovaya!

Raymond: I think it is very spiritual, but spiritual rather than theological. I don’t think it’s a philosophical meditation on religion as such, Bulgakov uses these characters because they are the best way to tell the story. Everyone relates to Christ at some point. People see themselves in Christ at different points, that is very important for the characters, for the cast, for Bulgakov. We are using Christ’s story as a metaphor for everyone’s own struggles. I hope that will be invoked in the audience as well.

What aspects of the show are you most excited about?

Raymond: There’s a lot of music, a lot of dance, a lot of comedy in our production. A lot of Russian tango, the ballet Russe, Diaghilev. We have a Billie Holiday song Gloomy Sunday and we’ve got the original Hungarian version. Jonnie [McAloon] plays Tchaikovsky on the violin, there is Shostakovich, there is Prokofiev. It is very eclectic. All the kind of little details of the novel, we found our own way to have leitmotifs.

Max: Bulgakov’s brand of comedy benefits from a more pantomimic, brash approach to the acting. Getting the cast to embrace this non-naturalistic, confrontational approach and ensuring that the design is as bold as possible has been a major part of the process. Part of the set (designed by Jess Edwards) is a constructivist structure that will stand like a monument to revolutionary communism on the side of the stage. The presence of the structure represents that revolutionary ideal of bringing art down to one objective truth of straight lines and strong material. The production is a lively fusion of music, dance, comedy and debate. The subject matter is punchy, diverse and magical. It’s one of the great classics of modern literature translated into an imaginative stage production where you’ll confront the themes and style of the original right before your eyes. The show draws on Russian street theatre spectacles and tableaux, interpreting the work as one that resonates today for its fantastical story-telling and its commentary on a society that, like ours today, is in danger of losing faith in itself and others.

The Master and the Margarita will be playing in Oxford, July 31 and August 2nd before going on to London and Edinburgh. Visit the website for tickets and information: www.oudsdobulgakov.com

No, it is all true, the hype is not an over-exaggeration, this is one of the best films out this summer. As we all know, Pixar have created films that rival the great Walt Disney in both originality and beauty. ‘Toy Story 3’ sees the end to the series that made Pixar’s name back in 1995; no creative expense has been spared in making it the best of the trilogy and one of the best Pixar films to date.

The film opens with an exciting imaginative adventure scene followed by a heart warming montage showing the interaction and love between Andy and his toys. When the dust settles, however, the audience find themselves back in Andy’s room: a lot of time has passed and things are very different. Nothing has escaped the change: Andy (still voiced by a now grown-up John Morris) is grown up and leaving for college; the puppy Buster has his fair share of grey hairs; and Andy’s toys are left half forgotten in his old toy box. Although many of our favourite toys are still in this film, such as Woody, Buzz and Jesse, to name a few, some are also missing. The ones that are still around have not changed: they still want to be played with and long for Andy’s attention. This childlike want is heartbreaking to watch. It is also clear that the toys are slowly becoming jaded as time passes; so begins the start of the message that Pixar is trying to tackle. The film aims to deal with loss of purpose and how we feel when we are looked over or no longer needed.

The solution presented to us and the toys is to try and live with no purpose, no responsibilities, no owners. Andy’s toys find this weight-free existence at Sunnyside Daycare where the toys have no owners and so have no no heartbreak. However, Sunnyside is a lot more sinister than it first appears.. It is here that the story starts to pick up pace with many action sequences, moving speeches and funny one-liners as well as introductions to many new characters, both toys and human.

This final instalment of the ‘Toy Story’ franchise easily has some of the best characters in it. We have the return of old favourites: Rex who is still as clumsy as ever; Ham who is voiced by Pixar good-luck charm John Ratzenberger; the Potato Heads with their alien adoptive children; slinky dog; the cowboy’s horse Bullseye; and of course Woody and Buzz, the film’s favourite duo. However there is also some female talent with Jessie the cow-girl and new comer Barbie. Both girls easily keep up with the male toys in both action and comedy. On top of these characters the audience are introduced to many more at Sunnyside Daycare such as Stretch, Chunk, Dollie and a host of others all voiced by famous Hollywood veterans such as Whoopi Goldberg and Timothy Dalton. The head of this host of new toys is Lots-O’-Huggin’ Bear (Lotso for short) who with the soft voice of Ned Beatty and bright purple fur, seems at first a kind and wise caretaker, but is in fact a ruthless warden who controls Sunnyside with intimidation and fear. He wields this fear with the help of Big Baby, his Lenny like accomplice who is strong, yet follows Lotso with blinding faith. Big Baby is a frightening character that harks back to the terrible creations found in Cid’s room in the first film. However easily the most stand out new character is Michael Keaton’s Ken, the embodiment of the metro-sexual man. With his All American smile, indignation at being called a ‘girl’s toy’ and expansive wardrobe that would make Carrie Fisher jealous, Ken could certainly be an idol for the modern man (a character some might relate to). The fashion montage in his walk in wardrobe is certainly a highlight of the film and makes him an immediate favourite with everyone watching. The great thing about all Pixar characters, and this film is no exception, is that they are not one dimensional. The good guys have flaws and annoying habits while the bad guys have relatable motives that cause them to act as they do. In this way these animated toys have are more realistic than something you might find in a M.Night Shyamalan production.

In typical Pixar fashion it’s not just the characters that have matured and improved since the previous film. The animation is easily the best ever, with beautiful bright colours, made more detailed by the 3D effect (although the jury is still out as to quite how much this improves the cinematic experience, in this reviewer’s opinion). Along with the animation, the emotional balance has been perfected with lots of jokes, both physical slapstick for the kids and witty quips for the adults, as well as lots of poignant moments and realisations. The film shows that a purposeless life is empty and that we never lose our purpose or importance, we simply grow out of old ones and start new ones. However along with the maturation Pixar has not lost its childlike humour with subtle in jokes and homages. Andy’s Mum’s car still has the licence plate A-113, which is subtle dedication to the classroom where many Pixar artists discovered their dream of animation. Many of the action scenes inside Sunnyside come from famous escape films such as ‘The Great Escape’. One of the new toys is Totoro, the mascot of the Japanese film studio Studio Ghibli with whom Pixar are on great terms. They also hint at previous jokes from the older ‘Toy Story’ films, such as ‘the claw’ and riding Buster like a horse, but these jokes have changed with time and are the funnier for it. There are probably many more in-jokes that first time viewers may not notice and, with this in mind, it’s worth going to see the film again and again to discover the plethora of hidden jokes and references. The movie also starts with a fantastic short film called ‘Night and Day’, which plays around wonderfully with the fusion of sound and vision and is easily one of the best short films Pixar has done in a long time.

‘Toy Story 3’ is the perfect end to a magnificent trilogy and will leave every member of the audience feeling warm, a little weepy, but fully satisfied with the ending. The film creates laugher and tears in both children and adults and yet no one is ashamed of this. The only thing to regret is that we did not show our own toys this much affection when we still had them.

Matt Isard

Woody, Buzz, Mr. Potatohead, Rex – these are just a few of the adorable characters that throw most of us right back into childhood and remind us of how magically fun the original two Toy Story films were, before bringing us right back to the present day and wowing us once again. Like their owner, Andy, you’ve probably grown up by now and will have headed for college. But, somehow, hearing ‘You’ve Got A Friend In Me’ playing to the sound of a Tom Hanks-voiced cowboy won’t just make you happy through the memory of being a kid. It will also make you happy right here and right now. Surely that’s not allowed? Surely only children can enjoy Pixar films this much? Toy Story 3 blows such prejudices out of the window, and that’s credit to how stunningly feel-good it is.

The premise is simple: times are changing. As Andy vacates his room, his family of old toys worry that they are headed for the bin. Andy actually intends to store them in the loft but, through an unfortunate sequence of events, they all end up destined for a play school where – as fresh donations – they expect to be cherished by a group of new children. They’re all ecstatic at the prospect, except for Woody. He can’t help but look at the name of his owner written on the bottom of his boot, and realise his and their obligations lie elsewhere. They must head back to where they belong.

When daycare turns out to be far from heaven, the other toys soon come round to a similar way of thinking. Barbie might be happy now she’s met Ken, but for everyone else, not only are the new kids maniacally young, hurling them around like anarchists, but all the toys there are governed by a seemingly benevolent, but in reality totalitarian, strawberry-smelling pink bear. He tweaks Buzz’s configurations so he becomes a straight-faced prison patrol guard, and when accompanied with the monkey on watch as eyes in the sky and robots encasing the perimeter with flashlights, our favourite toys seem destined to a life in confinement. Only through a perfectly apt and crazy adventure do they flee and successfully escape, heading back, naturally, to Andy’s bedroom where he once again can decide where he wishes their services to lie.

Like all Pixar films, it’s bright and beautifully colourful but this film is not solely a visual experience. Toy Story 3 also brings the biggest and most genuine of smiles to the audience’s faces for the length of its duration. From Woody being hurled into a play-time session in which the other toys explain they ‘do a lot of improv,’ to Buzz being programmed into Spanish mode in his post-police patrol phase, making him devilishly romantic as he dances around to woo cowgirl Jessie, it’s all wonderfully, phenomenally joyful stuff. There’s no other way of putting it.

That improv group joked about heading for Cannes. Perhaps that was a little ambitious, but I’m pretty sure they’d have been as pleasantly surprised as we’ve been to see their dreams come true when Toy Story 3 deservedly premiered at Edinburgh last month. With Pixar’s newest masterpiece, they have approached that holy grail of cinema: a perfect trilogy. Just keep it as Toy Story 3, full stop. Not Toy Story 3 3D.

Jacob Williamson