Oxford's biggest student newspaper, produced by and for members of the University of Oxford, since 1991.
CAKE Night, a brand new scratch night organised by Oxford students Anushka Chakravarti and Bea Udale-Smith, was an event that exuded cheerfulness and energy. Cocooned in Summertown’s North Wall Arts Centre, a rather miserable walk in the rain was well worth the intimate, relaxed geniality and entertainment. The sketch-show setup made for delightfully easy viewing […]
Continue Reading
When I first saw the trailer for the four-part Netflix original, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, one sentence put me off. In Bundy’s own voice, “I am looking for an opportunity to tell the story as best I can” makes it ominously clear that this is Ted’s moment, his last chance at […]
Continue Reading
Made in Dagenham is alive and, most prominently, relevant. At a time when theatre seems to lean towards the escapist, this musical provides us with a (true) story about the issue of equal, or unequal, pay. Everything in this production is well thought out. The musical itself, set in 1968 and concerning the troubling pay […]
Continue Reading
Simon Upton and Marceline Bresson are 2nd year undergraduates at Teddy Hall, studying PPE and E&M respectively. They have recently set up their own University Society, Oxford European Forum, as a space to discuss Europe holistically rather than in the context of any political agenda – and they are now recruiting for members. I met […]
Continue Reading
Frog’s Legs, by Hughie Shepherd-Cross, is not a play for everyone. Jokes about paying Egyptian slaves in cocaine while they build a pyramid for your wealthy, dead, French heiress wife are not for everyone. Nevertheless, this four-man play manages to walk a thin line between offensive and funny, resulting in an absurd but oddly endearing […]
Continue Reading
Warning: Spoilers ahead. The sequel is a difficult beast. Few directors manage to equal the quality of the original, let alone surpass it. There are some occasional cases of the former (The Godfather Part II, Toy Story 2), and even the latter (Austin Powers 2, The Dark Knight), though these examples are rare specimens. In […]
Continue Reading
We sat down to watch Eat Your Heart Out unsure of what to expect. We knew the play would be about eating disorders, and so it’s unexpectedly funny start was a pleasant surprise. The opening scene was clever, with the actors creating their own sound effects and swaying from side to side conveying the movement […]
Continue Reading
Netflix’s new seasonal special, The Christmas Wedding Planner, received almost universally dire online reviews, with one viewer writing, ‘I created an IMDd account just to warn people what a waste of time awful movie this is. Absolutely horrible’. It is so bad that there has even been speculation that Netflix commissioned it purely to lure […]
Continue Reading
The Only Way Is Suffrage, a new play from Charlotte Delaney, writer-in-residence at Oxford Women in Humanities, has run for four nights at the Burton Taylor Studio. Commemorating the recent centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, Delaney presents an hour-long interrogation of the relationship between women’s suffrage and social justice. This play […]
Continue Reading
As a film-fanatic I’ve always regarded theatre as something of a weird uncle – the ‘acting’ with a big A never seemed as nuanced, typically inspiring in me an almost irrepressible urge to laugh as the silly men shouted their overwrought emotion into the audience and paced manically up and down the stage in that […]
Continue Reading
With the corporate hollowing out of the media now commonplace, music journalism is fighting back. The battle against commercialism, clickbait headlines and contemporary trends is well and truly alive and kicking. Online hoaxes, shoddy reporting and all things ‘fake news’, 2018 has truly made its mark as a media meltdown. In Britain, reached journalistic rock […]
Continue Reading
Set during the dawn of the 20th century, Colette follows the true story of French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. The film begins with Colette (Keira Knightley) marrying Willy (Dominic West), and him drawing her away from her rural beginnings and into the bustling city life of Paris. Here she is encouraged to express her talents as […]
Continue Reading
After completing its first season I forced everyone I knew to dedicate a day to binging Amazon Prime’s newly-released The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel, a comedy that follows Miriam “Midge” Maisel as she pursues a career in stand-up comedy post-divorce. Set in 1958 New York City, the show has all the trappings of perfect nostalgic television. […]
Continue Reading
Yorgos Lanthimos’s excellent new film The Favourite is a bodice-ripper of a different sort. Gone are the breathy declarations love, replaced instead by absent-minded hand jobs and filthy jokes. Within the confines of a profoundly sordid royal household, we are treated to a spectacle of social climbing of the most devious sort. At times hilarious […]
Continue Reading
Every now and again we stumble upon an album that quietly evolves as it’s absorbed—its images, chord changes and melodies, gradually weaving themselves into the fabric of our own makeup until it exists, uniquely, for us. Adrianne Lenker’s album abysskiss enacts this very journey, a quiet display of subtle beauty blossoming from its brutal, emotional […]
Continue Reading
Fuelled by a heavy marketing campaign and blindfolded memes, Bird Box is Netflix Original’s biggest hit to date. The premise is pretty simple: Sandra Bullock plays tough mother Malorie, trying to protect herself and her two children in a post-apocalyptic world haunted by suicide-inducing monsters. These monsters never appear on screen directly, but we get […]
Continue Reading
At its heart, Doctor Who is a serial, and the standalone episodes this season have been by far the highlight. ‘Rosa’, the first with the Doctor back at full strength, has much of the feel of a 50s period piece as well as a sci-fi, and isn’t afraid to tackle heavy issues of race, through […]
Continue Reading
In 2018, there was one album I’d been waiting for: Anderson .Paak’s Oxnard. Dre was producing, “Tints” had the funky verve I’d been praying for. His live performance on SNL exuded polished and restrained swagger. Clearly he was someone who knew they were about to serve a rare and bloody steak to a blindfolded lion. […]
Continue Reading
It’s almost Christmas, and you all know what that means. Time to grab a blanket, make some hot chocolate, and pull out the old A Charlie Brown Christmas DVD. That’s right folks- it’s holiday film season! But what really defines a ‘Christmas movie’? Is it simply the time of year, or does the genre go […]
Continue Reading