Whilst it was released 60 years ago, at the height of the cold war, with the Cuban Missile crisis a very recent memory for audiences at the time and with the similarly themed Sidney Lumet drama Fail Safe (which starred Henry Fonda and Walther Matthau) released a few...
Carol Reed is certainly one of the great British film makers. Up there with Powell and Pressburger, David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock although he is, arguably, less well-known. It was a trilogy of films in the mid 1940s which made him a force to be reckoned with - IRA...
“Lefty” filmmaker John Sayles wrote and directed an extraordinary run of intelligent, small-scale independent American movies in the 1990s and early 2000s. Not bad for a guy I first got to know as the scriptwriter of several low budget shockers in the 1980s, including...
They don’t call the 1970s, Hollywood’s “second” Golden Age, for nothing. Looking back upon the decade, it’s an extraordinarily rich period and one of the most interesting films from those golden years is playing in a re-mastered copy at the UPP over the coming months...
“We are living in a land where sex and horror are the new Gods.” So pronounced Holly Johnson, lead singer of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, on the song Welcome to the Pleasure Dome, somewhere back in 1984 (an appropriate year for such a prophesy). He wasn’t far wrong. We...
I was wondering if everything you can think of, is better up on the big screen, in, you know, a movie? Sex, for sure. Sport, definitely. Landscapes? Perhaps. Faces? Maybe. Beauty? Absolutely. Food? Now, there’s an interesting one. The recently released art-house...
My students are often surprised to hear me say that there are a number of films I have seen well over 10 times at the cinema, in a lifetime devoted to the medium. And that’s not taking into account the numbers of viewings in a classroom, on video or DVD or on...
1941’s masterful Citizen Kane, unsurprisingly turned out to be a tough act to follow. Orson Welles, a child prodigy and star of theatre and radio was already well known to audiences across the world when he first arrived in Hollywood and was given carte blanche by RKO...
Now 91 (and long may she last), Elaine May is a fascinating 1970s Hollywood figure and one of the few (only?) mainstream women directors from the period – 1971’s A New Leaf (which is screening at the UPP in March, as part of the Oxford International Women’s Festival)...
Cinema lovers will continue to celebrate 2024 in style when the UPP screens a selection of films directed by the “none more maverick” German film director Werner Herzog in February. The season, which ties in with Radical Dreamer, the new BFI funded documentary about...
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!