As part of our recent Melodramarama! season, we were thrilled to launch a brand-new Young Film Critics Award, delivered in collaboration with the BFI Film Audience Network. The quality of submissions was outstanding, and we invited the award recipients to join us at...
This piece is adapted from an introduction given live by Georgia Humphreys at our Melodramarama! season double-bill of Leave Her to Heaven and Gone Girl on Saturday 15th November 2025. Throughout this November, we’ve been luxuriating in the many splendoured guises of...
I wrote in a recent blog that, in spite of directing both West Side Story and The Sound of Music plus the supernatural chiller The Haunting (recently screened at the UPP for Halloween), Robert Wise is not a name which tends to come up when thinking about Hollywood’s...
It would be fair to say that the Coen brothers made some of the best American films of the 90s and the early part of this Century. And it might also be fair to suggest that, since they stopped working together, it’s been slim pickings (Joel’s black and white version...
Almost 50 years after its initial release, Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam war movie Apocalypse Now has lost none of its power - something you can judge for yourself when the “Final Cut” of the movie is screened at the UPP on Saturday 9th August. It’s one of the...
In 1976, at the tender age of 13, “me and a few mates” decided to go to “the pictures” one Saturday afternoon. This was in the days when friendships were being forged over shared interests: music, books and, of course, movies. The problem was that they decided that...
Jonathan Glazer has thus far directed four feature films, all wildly different in terms of genre, style, tone and thematic concern. According to the influential Film critic Andrew Sarris that means he would be best described as a metteur en scene - a lesser, if...
Shirley MacLaine, who appears alongside Jack Lemmon and Double Indemnity’s Fred MacMurray in Billy Wilder’s brilliant 1960 bleak comedy The Apartment, which is screening at the UPP this month in a restored print, might well be Hollywood’s last great star. Still...
Directed by a drunken perfectionist, American born Scott, Alexander Mackendrick, who had previously made a number of much loved Ealing comedies (including The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers) The Sweet Smell of Success from 1957, which stars Burt Lancaster...
It might surprise you to learn that, contrary to popular belief, the western genre didn’t fall into abeyance in the 1970s, following the successes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, True Grit, The Wild Bunch and the films of Sergio Leone in the 1960s. Far from it....
Our beautiful art deco inspired auditorium can be found just off East Oxford's Cowley Road. We are open 7 days a week. We open the cinema and box office 30 minutes before the scheduled start time of each film, and the Box Office then closes 10 minutes after the film starts. We don’t show adverts, just a couple of trailers, so don't be late as the film itself starts very close to the advertised time!