Like so many things that happened over 50 years ago, it’s hard to believe that someone like Gene Hackman could have ever been a successful and popular leading man (and one of my favourite actors, ever). I saw him for the first time as wayward priest Rev. Frank Scott...
As you get older, you learn to love westerns all the more. I know there’s still them that say they can’t stand the genre. But for this grizzled, mean and melancholy son of a gun, who, to this day always sits facing the door in a bar, there’s nothing like ‘em. Any list...
As the year draws to a close, we’ve been looking back on the films that stayed with us long after the credits rolled. From boundary-pushing debuts to bold new work from filmmakers we love, these are the movies that sparked conversations at the bar, lingered in our...
This January, we pay tribute to five remarkable artists we lost in 2025 by bringing some of their most beloved films back to the cinema. It’s a rare chance to enjoy a handful of all-time great movies as they were meant to be experienced - together, in the dark, and...
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...
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 only show a few adverts – less than most cinemas – and we only play a couple of trailers, so please don’t be late as the film itself starts very close to the advertised time!