Power Ballad (cert 15). Doors at 7.00pm, film at 7.30pm.

Welcome to Oakwood Cinema - the independent community cinema for Oakwood and Roundhay in Leeds!  Oakwood Cinema is a not-for-profit community cinema showing a film each month (with an interval), with a licensed bar and snacks to make the night an enjoyable social event for all!

THE FILM

Our film for December is Power Ballad (cert 15)

Power Ballad is a 2026 comedy-drama set in Dublin, from writer and director John Carney who also created the fantastic Sing Street (which we showed at OC in 2019). In Power Ballad, the American comic actor Paul Rudd plays Rick Power, who had aspirations for rock superstardom in his youth but is now reduced to playing in a wedding band in Ireland having fallen for Rachel (Marcella Plunkett) and started a family. He still writes music which he attempts to weave into his wedding sets, much to the displeasure of his band and their audiences. However, at a posh wedding he meets and collaborates with an ex ‘boy band’ popstar called Danny Wilson (played by Nick Jonas from the Jonas Brothers); Danny is attempting to forge a solo career and the two strike up a friendship that evening and enjoy a drunken jam during which Rick plays Danny one of his own songs - and thinks no more of it. However, to his horror, Danny later claims the song as his own and it becomes a massive hit. Rick of course tries to get the deserved credit for it but no one believes him.

Power Ballad has moments of great comedy as well as pathos, with some similarities to the Richard Curtis film Yesterday (about someone claiming the Beatles music as their own) which we also showed at OC a couple of years ago.

In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw gave the film a four star review: "Once again, Irish writer-director John Carney delivers an aspartame rush of enjoyment with this terrific comedy of bromance and betrayal in the world of music. Power Ballad is about making it and dreaming big, about every busker never giving up on hopes of one day being mega. But as so often with Carney, it’s about something else, usually left unacknowledged in movies about music or any sort of showbusiness: the terrible binary of success and failure.”

Power Ballad is 1 hour 38 minutes long (plus a 20 minute interval).

TICKETS

Tickets are just £6.50 for everyone.  

A booking fee is applied to cover the bank processing fee for purchasing online tickets.

The main doors open at 7.00pm.  The film starts at 7.30pm. (Interval drinks are available.)