Saturday, May 24, 2025

Culture

Review: Closer – ‘Where Marber fails’

Labyrinth Production’s staging of Patrick Marber’s 1997 play, Closer, was an ambitious move for a student-run production company. Ambitious as it was, the cast themselves put on a strong...

Review: JACK – ‘Gas-lit showstoppers, intrigue, and murder’

Jack The Ripper is arguably the most famous killer of the Victorian era. There...

September 5: Journalism drama doesn’t question the facts enough

Set during the 1972 Munich Olympics, Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 tracks the ABC Sports...

Periodisation and the problem of now

Periodisation is the act of dividing literature into eras like Romanticism, Modernism, or Postmodernism...

Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ – a modern classic

According to all known laws of the music industry, there is no way that ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ should have been a hit....

“And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another”: Grosvenor Park’s ‘The Comedy of Errors’

"a fast paced and surprisingly polished socially distanced performance"

Review: Lil Peep’s ‘Hellboy’

TW: mental health and suicide In 2016, Lil Peep’s Hellboy mixtape dropped on Soundcloud. In 2017, Lil Peep died of a drug overdose. The...

Time spent in Oxford

"The photographs on the walls show people years ago in the same spot. Did they feel the same, love the same, breathe the same. It seems impossible that they did, even more so that they did not."

Ode to the Sunflowers my Dad bought for me

"You – yellow in 5 Acts, yellow in division to make up a whole – belong to the morning"

Cherwell Recommends: Historical Fiction

"This week’s recommendations each represent a unique “texture of lived experience” to perfection, proving that historical fiction is a genre full of excitement and experimentation, and one that also demands to be taken seriously."

Six of the best: film soundtracks to get you working again

After far too long at home for many of us, it’s almost the start of Michaelmas; I don’t know about anyone else, but my productivity has...

The return of live music: Nick Cave’s ‘Idiot Prayer’

Of the many cultural events 2020 has cruelly snatched away from us, the loss of live music is perhaps the one that has hit the...

Hope in the Dark: The ‘New World’ Playlist

"We could all do with a bit of escape and a bit of hope"

Six of the best: live albums

With the absence of ordinary gigs from our venues seeming certain to continue, our focus this week is on finding other ways to get...

Freshers’ Flu – Why My Mum Invented COVID

"Two cultures, both alike in dignity In times of (un)fair Corona, where we lay our scene From ancient tradition one plans to be set free where alcohol makes the liver unclean From forth the fatal minds of these two foes Parents worry they'll lose the apple of their eye; with misadventures and revealing clothes Do with Fresher's Week her dignity will die."

Monos: More Than Just A Colombian Story

Landes has managed to create a raw film about humanity that goes far beyond the context of the Colombian conflict

Tenet review: Can visual spectacle make up for missing humanity?

After three postponements and millions of dollars’ worth of Covid-induced extra marketing, the much-anticipated action-thriller film, Tenet, has finally greeted a global audience, giving...

Review: Midnight Sun

"Even as a firm member of Team Edward, 756 pages of Edward tormenting himself over a girl is fundamentally tedious."

What does it mean for fashion to be political in the 21st Century?

If Miranda Priestley has taught us anything, it is that there is no such thing as neutrality in fashion. Even the decision not to care...

Four Children

"And I sat with my back to the skies as I mouthed out a prayer to the winds and imagined them ghosts; for where I sat, half-anaesthetised, four children had used to sit"

Have I heard that somewhere before?: i’m thinking of ending things and a crisis of originality

Kaufman is confronted with the impossibility of forming a new idea in a world where everything has been thought before, by someone else

Essay Crisis

People often say that progress, is not always linear. and p r o g r e s s, sometimes doesn't always look like 2,000 words* (including citations) on a Microsoft Word document"

The power of perspective: how the narrative lens can transform a story

"The authority of the white and male point of view is undermined when voices that have been silenced for so long are finally given the opportunity to speak out, and to tell the story anew. This process of re-reading applies, perhaps most crucially, to history itself."

Cinematic activism: Wind River and the #MMIW campaign

The power of film lies in its ability to force you to view a situation from another perspective

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