Farewell Renfrew St. Cineworld.

Glasgow Renfrew Street’s Cineworld closed yesterday (28/09/25) and, as someone who’s had an unlimited card for the last seven years, I don’t mind admitting that this news has had an absolutely catastrophic impact on my mental health and emotional well-being.

This is not hyperbole. The closure of this cinema has plunged my psychological state down to such profound depths of despair and existential angst that mere human language suddenly reveals its descriptive limitations and inadequacies. The closest analogy would be to imagine the terrible intersection of three circles of a Venn diagram consisting of individual sets so depressing, so hideously desolate in nature I’m loathe to even put them into words, but they are as follows: the artwork of Egon Schiele; Mahler’s 5th Symphony; Prince Edward’s state of mind the morning after the broadcast of ‘It’s a Royal Knockout’. THAT level of despair.

Sure, there’s still the beloved GFT but the wonderful thing about the Cineworld unlimited card was it gave me access to something truly special — an unending stream of total and absolute shit.

Again, endless isn’t an exaggeration because I used my Cineworld card a LOT. I actually performed a quick calculation to get a rough approximation of how much time I’d spent watching movies there and it came to over 896 hrs. That’s a lot of crap.

And what glorious crap it was, some of the most memorable examples of bloody god-awful and unbearable cinematic codswallop being: ‘The Art of Racing in the Rain’ (2019), a film about a golden retriever who gets reincarnated as a Formula 1 racing car driver; the agonising George Clooney tropical island wedding rom-com ‘Ticket to Paradise’ (2022)… TWICE!; ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ (2022) — total bollocks; and, most insufferably of all, anything by Wes Anderson.

Yet there were also moments of beauty, wonder and awe I’ll never forget: the time I wept genuine tears of joy at the transcendental stupidity of Roland Emmerich’s ‘Moonfall’ (2021); hearing a theatre full of mums and their daughters bursting into uproarious laughter at the ‘men-who-think-The Godfather- is-the-greatest-movie-ever-made’ gag in ‘Barbie’ (2023); pink Godzilla in ‘Godzilla x Kong’ (2024); the Great ‘Minecraft’ riots of 2025. And it was only fitting that last film I saw there, ‘One Battle After Another’ (2025), turned out to be the best movie they’d ever screened.

These fleeting moments will always remain with me until, that is, the cinema of my mind ultimately closes forever.

Farewell, Cineworld Renfrew Street. I’ll never forget you.