City Screen Picturehouse
Although they do offer the bigger blockbusters, City Screen’s focus is on showing independent, art-house or foreign language films: if you feel like light-hearted Hollywood fare, you won’t find it here. On the other hand, films that could otherwise pass under your radar are picked up at City Screen and given the fanfare they deserve – it is the only cinema in York to show Brighton Rock, for example. The cinema itself is beautifully furnished – the three average-sized screens are each built from zinc, stone and timber. Tickets, at £6.50 after 5pm, are a little pricey, although it is worth it for the classy experience offered. As well as the usual refreshment stalls, there is an adjoining riverside café-restaurant offering a ‘comprehensive range of teas, coffees, and soft and alcoholic drinks’ as well as food cooked on the premises. The cinema is an easy journey from campus – just hop on any bus into town (or even walk!) and follow the high street and turn left before the big clock.
Reel Cinema
Reel is housed in what was once the Odeon cinema (if you didn’t guess from the huge ‘ODEON’ sign). It is the only surviving remnant of the cinema boom of the beginning of last century, and as such it is a must-see for cinema enthusiasts. For the rest of us, it is probably best avoided. There are five screens: the first, the original Odeon screen, is enormous, seating almost 700. However, you are more likely to be stuck with one of the four newer additions, which range from the poky at best to the seminar-room size at worst. One student claimed that the screen in one such room was ‘no bigger than my laptop screen’ and that before the performance, someone had to walk to the back to turn the light off. Even the big screen is prone to disaster – who can forget Pottergate of 2009, in which hundreds of customers queued for hours for the premiere of the latest Harry Potter, only to be turned away because a clerical error allowed more seats to be booked than were available. The staff, while obviously not so conscientious about the films themselves, are very strict about allowing food into the cinema, so snacks must be well-hidden or disguised. It’s slightly out-of-town – you’d need to stay on the number 4 past the station. A slightly redeeming factor is the price: if you go on Monday or Wednesday, you’ll only have to dish out £4 for a ticket, although at peak times you will pay just as much as the other cinemas.
Vue Cinema
Vue, a large multiplex cinema, offers a more professional film-going experience. By dint of being a multiplex, however, it is not in the city centre but far into the suburbs, at the end of the number 6 bus route. Since the 6 no longer stops on campus, you’d have to intercept its route in Tang Hall, then brave the 40-minute journey through to the other side of town – alternatively, if there is a group of you, a taxi would not be much more expensive than a bus ticket. The long and hazardous journey is probably worth it for the sheer bulk of film that Vue offers; they show every current Hollywood blockbuster that you could imagine, four or five times a day. Vue is the cheesy foil to the arty, indy films that City Screen offers, and between the two of them every major film is covered. Vue has 12 good-sized screens with an average of about 250 seats each, the smallest having about half of that – so there are no really tight squeezes. They offer the usual refreshments, but a better idea would be to pop into the 24-hour Tesco opposite and stock up on much cheaper snacks (obviously hide them in your jackets/handbags). At evenings and weekends you’ll pay around £6, but go during the day in the week and it’ll be cut to £4.80.
York Student Cinema
As a student-run organisation rather than a fully-fledged cinema chain, it would be unfair to judge the Student Cinema to the same standards as the other cinemas in York. Its obvious downfall is that it cannot show new films until a good few months after they are released, at which point it almost seems worth it to wait for the DVD. However, the incredibly reasonable price (£3) and the great walking distance from campus (zero minutes) mean its a good, cheap way to spend an evening. Of the three films shown (on Monday, Thursday and Friday) each week, YSC occasionally show an older, critically succesful film – next week, for example, they are showing Pan’s Labyrinth. Refreshments are limited to a hastily-munched snack from the vending machine outside before the film – YSC’s website states that: ‘should YSC staff see any, we must ask for it to be put away or left outside’, which sounds like a carefully-worded suggestion to hide your snacks well. The Student Cinema can be found in P/X/001, or, as it is colloquially known, that Physics lecture hall that looks like it is about to fall into the lake.