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....
As 2024 comes to a close, it’s time to celebrate the standout films that defined the year. From visionary directors such as Yorgos Lanthimos and Jonthan Glazer to unforgettable performances from the likes of Andrew Scott and Emma Stone, these are the UPP's Films of...
Paul Thomas Anderson is, arguably, the finest American film director, currently working. Yes, he’s had his misfires (Inherent Vice and The Master most definitely have their longeurs) and he regularly fluffs his endings (the otherwise perfect Licorice Pizza literally...
Charles Vidor’s 1946 Gilda, which is screening in a new 75th anniversary print at the UPP this month, with its eponymous femme fatale central character; brooding atmosphere (courtesy of Carl Dreyer’s cinematographer Rudolph Matte) and dark thematic concerns is (in...
I have already written elsewhere about the work of Gene Hackman, one of the finest actors to emerge from Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 70s, but, lest we forget, there was also another great Gene to be found on our screens around the same time – the hilariously...
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...
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!