Celebrating Cinema

Why are journeys one of cinema's defining storytelling forms? Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey brings one of literature's greatest journeys to the screen. Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms discuss whether the film succeeds as an epic, why Nolan's obsession with IMAX shapes the experience as much as the storytelling, and whether a cast this famous ever lets the world of the film feel fully inhabited. They also introduce LAB111's new season of quests, exiles and homecomings, from Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Beau Is Afraid to The Seventh Seal, asking what these films reveal about why cinema returns to stories of people searching for a place to belong. Get tickets to The Odyssey @ LAB111Get tickets to It's Not The Destination, It's The Journey @ LAB111Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: No Country For Old Men @ LAB111A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

Do ratings help us discover great films or have they quietly changed the way we watch?Before you've even bought a ticket, you probably know the Letterboxd average, the IMDb score or the Rotten Tomatoes percentage. Somewhere between the opening scene and the closing credits, many of us are already deciding on a number of our own.Laura Gommans is joined by producer Elliot Bloom to discuss what ratings have done to film culture. From an IMDb Top 250 that barely changes to Rotten Tomatoes' aggregate scores, they explore how audience opinion shapes everything from blockbuster filmmaking to the rise of safe, audience-tested stars, and why the best films rarely fit neatly into a number.Get tickets to ⁠Girly Pop! But I'm A Cheerleader⁠ @ LAB111Get tickets to ⁠Schmutz Cinema: Close-Up On Late⁠x @ LAB111A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

The Watermelon Woman (1996) was Cheryl Dunye's debut and the first American feature directed by a Black lesbian. A film that slips between video-store romance and a forged archive, asking who gets recorded by cinema and who gets written out of it. Thirty years on, it has been restored, added to the Criterion Collection, and, for the very first time, released in Dutch cinemas.Filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus is joined by Justine Knijn, distributor at Eye Filmmuseum and the person bringing the film to the Netherlands. They get into the film's faked documentary structure and its late reveal; the 1996 sex scene that drew conservative backlash over its tiny public budget; and the satire of academia.A conversation about lesbian film history, restoration, and the long afterlife of films the industry tried to forget and a case for a mainstream gay summer.Get tickets to ⁠⁠The Watermelon Woman @ LAB111Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: No Country For Old Men @ LAB111Get tickets to ⁠⁠Fight The Power: Palestine 36 @ LAB111 Get tickets to Girly Pop! But I'm A Cheerleader @ LAB111Get tickets to Schmutz Cinema: Close-Up On Latex @ LAB111🎧 New episodes weekly. Leave a review to help more people find us.A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

Nobody has ever filmed a real alien, so why do they all look the same? The grey skin, the black almond eyes, sixty years running. This week Laura Gommans is joined by historian Alexander Bartels, who curated LAB111's We Are Not Alone season, for a conversation about the gap between the aliens cinema gives us and the things people actually report seeing. On screen: greys, flying saucers, humanoid visitors. From the real records that Bartels studies: declassified military footage, radar data, government files from around the world there are mostly orbs and lights, unspectacular and almost impossible to film. So where did the grey come from? They follow the loop back to one telling case: The Bellero Shield, an episode of The Outer Limits that aired in February 1964, twelve days before Barney Hill, under hypnosis, drew the wrap-around-eyed alien that matched it almost exactly. Screen and sighting have been copying each other ever since, right up to a 2024 Pentagon report that blames film and television for what people believe they've seen. Has cinema ever shown us something genuinely other, or only ever redrawn ourselves?Get tickets to ⁠Disclosure Day⁠ @ LAB111Get tickets to ⁠We Are Not Alone⁠ @ LAB111 A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

Steven Spielberg spent fifty years teaching us to look up. When the Pentagon released its real alien files, nobody blinked. His new film Disclosure Day marks the day the truth finally lands — this time his aliens look back at us, but the question is whether anyone still believes him.Fresh from the Tuschinski premiere, Laura Gommans and producer Elliot Bloom get into late Spielberg — shortcuts, or message over quality — empathy as the ruling emotion of the universe, and whether cinema's great sentimentalist can still earn the tears. One of them cried twice. The other counted seventy FBI agents with no peripheral vision.With a voice note from BBC film critic Ali Plumb on the night Spielberg crashed his pub quiz, and a listener's hot take on thirty wet years of Spielberg's cinematographer Janusz Kamiński.Spoilers from 18:06 — come back when you've seen it.Get tickets to Disclosure Day @ LAB111Get tickets to We Are Not Alone @ LAB111 A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

The Fast and the Furious (Rob Cohen, 2001) was a small film about Los Angeles street racers, immigrant car culture, and a cop who didn't want to be one. Twenty-five years on it's a seven-billion-dollar franchise where cars get launched into space and "family" is a marketing strategy. From Echo Park to outer space — what does that arc tell us about Hollywood?This is the first part of Cine of the Times, a new monthly Celebrating Cinema strand. Each month, critic Hugo Emmerzael (Filmkrant, Locarno) and media studies scholar Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University) take one film from the century so far, ranging from arthouse to spectacular pulp. This month: the serialised blockbuster, the economics of the sequel, and how a street-racing B-movie became the template for the modern studio franchise.Listen first. Then join us at LAB111 on Wednesday 17 June — curated clips, an extended introduction, and a post-screening discussion. Get your tickets here.A film podcast from LAB111 — Amsterdam's arthouse cinema for independent and cult films. Produced by Elliot Bloom.

Kane Parsons made the Backrooms on YouTube when he was only sixteen. Over 200 million views later, A24 has handed him his feature debut, making him the studio's youngest director ever at 20. But the yellow walls still don't end.This week Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom go into the maze and come back with an answer that has very little to do with what's actually inside. The Backrooms, they argue, is about us, stuck in our own feedback loop, drifting through vacant spaces. Online, half the internet thinks Kane Parsons couldn't have directed such a hit so young. Mark Duplass, who was on set the whole time, says they're wrong. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve carry the screen, with James Wan and Osgood Perkins producing. Laura and Elliot ask: what does it take to direct a feature like this at 20 with a crew this experienced? And has A24 found its next pipeline for talent — skipping film school for YouTube horror directors?Get tickets to Backrooms @ LAB111Get tickets to ⁠⁠Cine of The Times: The Fast And The Furious⁠⁠ @ LAB111 Get tickets to Straight To Video: Nightmare At Noon @ LAB111A film podcast from LAB111 — Amsterdam's arthouse cinema for independent and cult films. Produced by Elliot Bloom.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw has been sending dispatches from Cannes since 1999. If you ask him what's changed in 27 years, he claims: nothing. He means it as a compliment.Hugo Emmerzael sits down with the legendary film critic on the Croisette mapping out Peter's journey through film, from his first memory of cinema through the strange, accidental route into one of the most-read critic chairs in the English-speaking press. They get into why only Cannes, among the major film festivals, still places film criticism at the heart of it all.Plus five films that caught Peter's attention this year: Andrey Zvyagintsev's Minotaur, Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland, Rodrigo Sorogoyen's Beloved, Marine Atlan's La Gradiva, and Clio Barnard's I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, and why we should value the politics inside the films rather than the statements and press conferences around them.Get tickets to ⁠Cine of The Times: The Fast And The Furious⁠ @ LAB111 Get tickets to ⁠Moving incl. Ramen⁠ @ LAB111Get tickets to ⁠Film Lecture: Everything Is Cinema - The Filmic Alchemy Of Jean-Luc Godard⁠ @ LAB111A film podcast from LAB111 — Amsterdam's arthouse cinema for independent and cult films. Produced by Elliot Bloom.

Long before phones turned every life into footage, a small line of filmmakers was already pointing the camera at themselves — not to perform, but to work out what a life was. This week, producer Elliot Bloom sits down with co-host Kiriko Mechanicus to talk about her new short documentary How To Catch A Butterfly — a first-person essay film that traces how ethnic fetishisation has shaped her relationships and sexual experiences as a Dutch-Japanese woman. The film had its world premiere at SXSW Documentary Short Competition 2026 and won the EMEL Short Film Grand Prize at Indie Lisboa.Together they ask why we keep personal archives at all and what those archives teach us back, especially now, living through the most self-documented stretch of human history — through three landmarks of autobiographical documentary: Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation (2003), Bing Liu's Minding The Gap (2018), and Tom Fassaert's A Family Affair (2015).Plus: a hot take from one of our listeners on Michael , Antoine Fuqua's long-delayed Michael Jackson biopic, now in cinemas.Related episodes: Documentary Ethics with Miriam Guttmann · 2000 Metres To Andriivka And Why We Need Documentary Films.

Cinema's dirtiest little secret is that it's designed to make you want something you can never have.In this episode of Celebrating Cinema, host Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms — LAB111's Head of Cinema — talk about what cinema's fixations have done to them. Laura learned to write in Elvish because of The Lord of the Rings. Tom is still working out how much of his idea of relationships comes from Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). We have all spent more time thinking about actors and characters we will never meet than is probably reasonable. Parasocial attachment used to be the strange edge of fandom. Now it's the default condition of watching.The conversation moves through 60 years of films about obsession — Vertigo, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), and what they made possible: Misery, Perfect Blue, La Pianiste, Whiplash, Babygirl — but the question underneath is the one cinema doesn't like to answer. What does this kind of looking do to the people being looked at? The actor engineered into someone else's ideal. The face that turns into a brand. And whether cinema knows what it's done to us, or is still pretending it doesn't.A film podcast from LAB111 — Amsterdam's arthouse cinema for independent and cult films. Programmed alongside the Can't Get You Out Of My Head season. Produced by Elliot Bloom. Tickets at lab111.nl/obsession.

Amadeus (1984, Miloš Forman) is not really about Mozart. It's a film about the rest of us — the ones who can recognise genius but will never possess it. Salieri is the true protagonist of this musical biopic. His tragedy isn't jealousy, it's clarity.Now back in cinemas in a new 4K restoration, Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms get into mediocrity, and what it means to be desperate to be a genius and know, quietly, that you won't be. Whether musical genius is even something we value anymore. And if TikTok — full of AI Slop, or a thousand strangers going viral for no particular reason — is the logical conclusion of a culture that stopped caring.For everyone currently in their Salieri era.Get tickets to Amadeus @ LAB111Get tickets to Film Lecture: My Film Is Vietnam @ LAB111Get tickets to Can't Get You Out of My Head: Films of Obsession @ LAB111Get tickets to Fight The Power: How To Catch A Butterfly @ LAB111

Miranda once told Andy she was the greatest disappointment of her career. Twenty years on, the question isn't whether she was right — it's what Andy did with it.Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom chat about The Devil Wears Prada and the new sequel and what they have to say about ambition, high fashion, and the specific cruelty of wanting things that cost more than you can reasonably pay. We discuss the consequences for Miranda who is now no longer untouchable — threatened by corporate money that sees a fashion magazine and thinks: overhead. Her methods belong to another era. So does her certainty.Both films ask what we owe the people who pushed us, even when the pushing was cruel. Whether Miranda is a feminist icon or a toxic boss may matter less than what she made possible.Plus a hot take from one of our listeners on whether screenwriters get enough credit for the worlds they create.Get tickets to The Devil Wears Prada 2 @ LAB111Get tickets to Girls in Film Presents: Behind The Scenes of Motherhood @ LAB111The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, USA, 2006). The Devil Wears Prada 2 (USA, 2025).

Can a film be more intimate than pornography? Can a film be more intimate than pornography? In Truly Naked (2026), BAFTA-nominated writer-director Muriel D'Ansembourg tells the story of Alec — a teenager raised by two parents in the adult industry, who's seen everything about sex except real intimacy. A school project on porn addiction, and a feminist classmate, force him to confront how his generation actually encounters sex. Laura Gommans sits down with Muriel to ask what cinema still knows about intimacy that the erotic industry has given up on: close-ups, the gaze, the longing for touch. And whether a film that stages intimacy so precisely is any less manipulative than pornography.Follow LAB111 on LetterboxdListen back to Where Has All The Sex In Cinema Gone.

A note from us: we spent the past two weeks going through your survey responses — thank you to everyone who filled it in. Winners will be contacted this week. We're working on what comes next, but we didn't want to leave you hanging.Last year it was A Complete Unknown, Better Man, Maria, this year it's now Michael Jackson. The musical biopic is back again, with all its cliches.We recorded this conversation when A Complete Unknown hit cinemas. Hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael ask what it takes to make a great musical biopic — a genre too often content with greatest-hits storytelling: the origin-story childhood, the long climb, the fall, the redemption arc that arrives whether the life earned one or not. Cinema can do stranger, more honest things with a life. Why doesn't it?We revisit the films that actually break the formula, ask why audiences keep returning to the glossy reenactment, and consider what the genre would look like if it stopped playing it safe.With MJ arriving this month, it felt like the right moment to bring this one back.

What is the worst thing you've ever done?This week, hosts Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom watched Kristoffer Borgli's The Drama — and neither of them could stop thinking about it. No spoilers, just their honest reaction to Zendaya and Robert Pattinson's wedding spiralling wonderfully out of control, and what it says about how quickly we judge other people's secrets while sitting on a few of our own.From there: why do the biggest stars on the planet — the ones who are Twilight, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games — keep choosing the strangest roles the moment nobody's watching? Robert Pattinson in sewers. Daniel Radcliffe with a gun for a hand. Kristen Stewart dismantling her own image frame by frame. Is it rebellion, artistic hunger, or is weird the only honest thing left after you've played a hero for a decade?And we're launching something new — Hot Takes, our listener segment where you get to say the thing nobody else will. This week: K-Pop deserves a place in the Criterion Collection. You might be surprised where we land.Get tickets to The Drama @ LAB111Send your hot takes to [email protected] LAB111 on Letterboxd

Divorce is rarely one story. It's four, or five — each told from a different room in the same house. In his new film A Family, Mees Peijnenburg's puts the camera with the children, and what he finds there is something most films about broken homes don't often reach: not blame, not sides, but the bewildered love of people too young to know they're supposed to pick one.Producer Elliot Bloom sits down with Mees to talk about the film, Dutch cinema, and the emotional instinct at the heart of all his work — this search for the places where people feel safe, or desperately want to. We also get into his friendship with Lukas Dhont, director of Close, and why both filmmakers keep returning to young characters who are overwhelmed by life.A Family came from somewhere real for Mees, and yet it reaches beyond the personal — holding every perspective in a family coming apart, and asking what love looks like when the structure it lived inside is gone.Get tickets to A Family @ LAB111Follow LAB111 on Letterboxd

Is this the year of the Skarsgårds? Hosts Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom kick things off with Pillion, Alexander Skarsgård's domcom about a BDSM relationship that keeps flipping the script on who's actually holding the power. Funnier and sharper than you'd expect, and a lot more honest about relationships.Then brother Bill Skarsgård shows up in Gus Van Sant's Dead Man's Wire, an offbeat thriller based a true-life hostage-taker, Tony Kiritsis, wanting to get back what he was owed. Laura and Elliot discuss the possible message behind Van Sant making this film, right now, in a world where Luigi Mangione fan edits are trending.And Laura and her folk-drenched past is eager to chat about History of Sound. A tender, quietly devastating homage from Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor to American folk music that's barely registering on anyone's radar.Fill out our ⁠⁠⁠survey⁠⁠⁠ and win up to €100 worth of prizes. Get tickets to Pillion @ LAB111Get tickets to Dead Man's Wire @ LAB111Get tickets to ⁠The History of Sound⁠ @ LAB111Get tickets to The Third Man @ LAB111Follow us on ⁠Letterboxd.

When the White House posts a montage of Hollywood blockbusters cut against US drone strikes on Iran, it raises a question Italian cinema has spent seventy years wrestling with: can cinema ever truly resist power — or does it always end up serving it?In this episode, hosts Hugo Emmerzael and Elliot Bloom take Bernardo Bertolucci's newly restored masterpiece Il Conformista (1970) as their guide. Moving through Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, they trace how a generation of Italian filmmakers tried to dismantle the seduction of fascism by inhabiting its aesthetics — and ask what that tradition tells us about cinema's role in manufacturing national myths in 2026.Fill out our ⁠⁠survey⁠⁠ and win up to €100 worth of prizes. Get tickets to Il Conformista @ LAB111 Get tickets to Kiki's Delivery Service (4K Restoration) @ LAB111Get tickets to International Cinema: Amrum @ LAB111Get tickets to HUMP! Film Festival – Spring Lineup @ LAB111Follow us on LetterboxdFilms discussed: Il Conformista (1970), The Night Porter (1974), Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

From the alien drifter of The Man Who Fell to Earth to the unforgettable Goblin King of Labyrinth, David Bowie built one of the strangest and most fascinating film careers in pop history.In this episode, hosts Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms dive into David Bowie’s acting career, exploring how the musician moved through cinema across four decades. They chat about what drew Bowie to the silver screen, why acting became one of his favourite side quests, and the performances that defined his screen presence.From playing Andy Warhol in Basquiat to a perfectly deadpan cameo in Zoolander, they discuss why directors kept casting Bowie, what made him so magnetically strange on camera, and which roles remain the most unforgettable—before tackling the impossible question: who could ever play Bowie in a biopic?Fill out our ⁠survey⁠ and win up to €100 worth of prizes.Get tickets to Sound And Vision: Remembering David Bowie @ LAB111Films Mentioned: The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976) Christiane F. (Uli Edel, 1981) Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (Nagisa Oshima, 1983) The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983) Labyrinth (Jim Henson, 1986) The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988) Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch, 1992) Basquiat (Julian Schnabel, 1996) Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001)Moonage Daydream (Brett Morgen, 2022)

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at nineteen. Cinema has been retelling it ever since - and mainly getting it wrong.Hosts Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms dig into the big question: is Frankenstein the story of a misunderstood outcast, an abandoned child who never asked to exist, or a cautionary tale about scientists who should really know better? More importantly, why is Frankenstein always so ugly?They trace the monster on screen through James Whale's Universal original in 1931, Hammer Horror's gloriously excessive franchise — essentially the Marvel Universe before Marvel existed — and into modern Frankenstein-by-another-name films like Ex Machina and Blade Runner. Plus reviews of the two new adaptations, Frankenstein and The Bride, putting the myth back in the spotlight.Also: Laura confesses to having seen Fifty Shades Darker in the cinema three times and to watching Arrival at the gym. This is relevant. Kind of.Fill out our survey and win up to €100 worth of prizes.Get your tickets to The Bride @ LAB111Get your tickets to Female Frame @ LAB111Listen back to The Immortal Cinema of Bloodsuckers And NightstalkersListen back to Why Zombies Refuse To DieListen back to How Sex And The City 2 Maps The Rise And Fall Of American Empire

At this year's Berlinale Film Festival, Wim Wenders declared that cinema is not political — so hosts Elliot Bloom and Kiriko Mechanicus, both speaking from their own diasporic experiences, decided to put that to the test. Moving through Persepolis, Incendies, Bend It Like Beckham, Girlhood, and Chantal Akerman's News from Home, they explore how diaspora cinema transforms the politics of borders and belonging into something deeply, unavoidably human. Because for anyone who has ever lived between cultures, cinema isn't just art — it's a second home.This episode is part of Diaspora Diaries, LAB111's curated season running January through March exploring stories of movement, identity, and belonging on the big screen. Get tickets to Diaspora Diaries @ LAB111Listen back to Why Wim Wenders?Listen back to Can We Still Watch Films By Bad People?

Hugo Emmerzael speaks with DJ and composer Kangding Ray about Sirat — a punishing, bass-driven plunge into the borderlands of rave culture. The film follows a father searching for his missing daughter amid sound systems and stateless horizons, unfolding less as conventional narrative than as sensory immersion.Kangding Ray reflects on his journey from underground club DJ to film composer, and on what it means to carry the ethos of the dancefloor into cinema. Rather than sanitising rave culture, he was determined to preserve its rawness.Together they explore how to craft a score that doesn’t simply underscore the image but unsettles it They also discuss shaping the sonic textures of the landscape itself and why rave on film has so often felt like a betrayal of the culture it tries to depict.Get tickets to Sirāt @ LAB111

With social media hype swirling around Marty Supreme and Wuthering Heights, hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael unpack the marketing machinery behind both releases—and whether the films can live up to the discourse they’ve generated.Hugo questions whether the outrage over Emerald Fennell’s reimagining of Heathcliff is worth our energy, suggesting we might be better off taking the film at face value instead of getting caught up in manufactured controversy. Meanwhile, Laura traces the evolution of movie marketin, from the event-cinema spectacle of Jaws and Jurassic Park to the viral mythmaking of The Blair Witch Project, into today’s algorithm-driven campaigns built on shock, virality, and off-screen narratives.Together they discuss how in an era of social media spectacle, are studios selling us the film—or the conversation around it?Get tickets to Marty Supreme @ LAB111Get tickets to Wuthering Heights @ LAB111

Host Laura Gommans chats with cultural critic Esje Seigfried about the lasting impact of Brokeback Mountain 20 years on, and how queer cinema has expanded since. They dig into the genre’s history of tragedy and grief—and ask: can queer stories also be fun, messy and steamy, like Heated Rivalry and Heartstopper? From the melancholia of Happy Together to the risks queer filmmakers take today, they explore the queer stories we want to see more of, and whether it really matters if a straight actor plays a queer role.Get tickets to Brokeback Mountain @ LAB111Get tickets to Happy Together @ LAB111

In this episode, Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael dive into what might be Park Chan-wook’s masterpiece, No Other Choice, breaking down how it tackles capitalism and the fragile middle-class experience in ways that feel all too real.They also chat about the recent Oscar nominations and the 45th anniversary of Kubrick’s The Shining—exploring why the true horror of this classic, how it clashed with Stephen King’s vision, and why Kubrick would have loved TikTok film debates.Get tickets to No Other ChoiceGet tickets to The ShiningGet tickets to Film Lecture: How To Build A Haunted Hotel?Get tickets to Drink-Along: The FallGet tickets to Brazil Beneath The Surface

The death of French cinema icon Brigitte Bardot has reignited a familiar and uncomfortable question: can we separate art from the artist? Long celebrated as a screen legend, Bardot’s legacy is also inseparable from her openly expressed far-right views—forcing a renewed reckoning with how we engage with culturally significant work made by morally compromised figures.In this episode of Celebrating Cinema, hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael reflect on their own responsibilities as viewers and critics. They discuss whether watching films by “bad people” can still offer insight into the art and the person behind it, and whether cinema can act as a space to confront difficult ideas rather than retreat from them.If the work already exists, what does critical engagement look like—and do we watch films for their politics, their artistry, or something more complicated?Get tickets to Le Mépris @ LAB111Get tickets to Diaspora Diarires @ LAB111Get tickets to Straight to Video: Brain Damage @ LAB111

Hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael explore Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet (yes, a movie about Shakespeare and his family), alongside a range of movies that are, in one way or another, really just adaptations of Shakespeare's plays.Laura and Hugo also discuss Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a film that may have slipped under the radar this awards season, though Ethan Hawke’s magnetic performance is not to be missed, as well as the endearing documentary Tale of Sylian.Get tickets to Hamnet @ LAB111Get tickets to Diaspora Diarires @ LAB111Get tickets to Fight The Power: Goodbye Julia @ LAB111

2000 Metres to Andriivka is an extraordinary and deeply immersive war documentary. The latest film from Ukrainian director Mstyslav Chernov gets hosts Kiriko and Hugo thinking about why we watch documentaries in the first place and what makes them so powerful right now.They talk about how documentary cinema can respond to the urgency of the world around us, while also finding beauty in raw, unfiltered reality. As they unpack Chernov’s almost video game–like sense of movement and immersion, the conversation opens up into a bigger question: are documentaries showing us something that contemporary fiction films are struggling to capture?Get tickets to 2000 Metres to Adrivka @ LAB111Get tickets to Film & Food: Ramen Shop @ LAB111Get tickets to Fight The Power: Goodbye Julia @ LAB111Get tickets to It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley @ LAB111Listen to Documentary Ethics w/ Miriam GuttmanListen to The Estactic Truth: The Films of Werner Herzog

This week, Laura and Hugo dive into films chosen by you. Drawing from our LAB Suggestions programme, where audiences select their favourite films to be shown on the big screen in Amsterdam, they share their standout picks. From the chilling plausibility of Children of Men to a friendly (but pointed) debate over whether Christopher Nolan’s Inception owes more than a little to Satoshi Kon’s Paprika.Along the way, they share tidbits from conversations with Colin Farrell and Alfonso Cuarón, plus a voice note from one of our listeners whose pick, The NeverEnding Story, is heading to the big screen.Get tickets to LAB Suggestions @ LAB111Get tickets to Hamnet @ LAB111Get tickets to The Actor’s Archive: Jane Fonda @ LAB111Get tickets to Fight The Power: Goodbye Julia @ LAB111

As the year comes to a close, hosts Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom look back on the films that defined 2025. They revisit their standout favourites, unexpected discoveries, and the releases that missed the mark. They also explore why so many films from major directors felt surprisingly average this year and spotlight a handful of remarkable titles that never reached Dutch cinemas but deserve far more attention. Share your own favourite films of 2025 and join the conversation.

In this final review roundup before the festive season, hosts Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom take a look at some new releases that should be on your radar this winter. Joachim Trier returns with Sentimental Value, a film about filmmaking and a tender companion to his celebrated feature The Worst Person in the World. Harris Dickerson steps behind the camera for the first time with Urchin, a striking debut anchored by a magnetic performance from Frank Dillane. Rose Byrne offers one of the most moving turns of her career as she navigates the weight of single parenthood in Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I Would Kick You. Finally, Left Handed Girl from Shih Ching Tsou offers a quietly affecting study of intimacy as it traces the intertwined lives of a mother and her two daughters, shaped through Tsou’s long standing creative partnership with Sean Baker.Get tickets to Sentimental Value @ LAB111Get tickets to Urchin @ LAB111Get tickets to If I Had Legs I'd Kick You @ LAB111Get tickets to Left-Handed Girl @ LAB111

Host Laura Gommans, an unabashed devotee of festive films, teams up with Kiriko, who prefers her Christmas viewing a little more Eyes Wide Shut than Love Actually. Together they unpack what truly makes a film “festive,” trade beloved classics and oddball alternatives, and dream up which directors should (or absolutely shouldn’t) make a holiday movie. As they share how cinema shapes their own festive traditions.Get tickets to Holiday Classics @ LAB111Get tickets to LAB111 9th Aniversary PartyGet tickets to Girly Pop: The Holiday @ LAB111

Sex and the City may not be canonical cinema, but as a cultural artefact it charts America’s imperial confidence, and its slow, chaotic unravelling, with uncanny precision. After finally submitting to the franchise this year, host Hugo Emmerzael became obsessed, culminating in his Little White Lies piece “Sex and the City 2 and the End of America.”In this episode, Hugo and Kiriko Mechanicus revisit the original series, the two films, and And Just Like That…, tracing how a once-aspirational guide to modern living morphed into something more deranged, unhinged and somehow more American than ever. What emerges is a sharp, fast-moving portrait of how over three decades of shifting national fantasies found their reflection in one of pop culture’s most unlikely mirrors.Read Hugo's Article

In this review roundup, hosts Laura Gommans and producer Elliot Bloom find themselves divided on Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, a fierce, unflinching portrait of postpartum collapse starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. Laura and Elliot are also split on Splitsville, a buoyant physical comedy about the messiness of opening up a marriage. But both are fully won over by Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, a playful reframing of the making of À Bout de Souffle told in the grammar of the French New Wave itself.Laura also speaks with Maxi Meissner, curator of Schmutz Cinema, about what audiences can expect from Schmutz XL: The Birthday Edition on December 6th , a special LAB111 collaboration celebrating queer intimacy and pleasure on screen.Get tickets to Schmutz XL: The Birthday Edition @ LAB111Get tickets to Die My Love @ LAB111Get tickets to Splitsville @ LAB111Get tickets to Nouvelle Vague @ LAB111Get tickets to La Nouvelle Vague de Jean-Luc Godard @ LAB111

To mark the 50th-anniversary rerelease of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, hosts Hugo Emmerzael and Tom Ooms revisit the career of the man at the center of its enduring power: Jack Nicholson. In this episode, they explore how Nicholson’s performances, volatile and mischievous yet remarkably controlled, forged a style of American screen acting entirely his own.From his countercultural rise in the late ’60s to the defining roles that secured his place as a cinema icon, Hugo and Tom examine the man behind the myth, the craft behind the charisma, and the legacy Nicholson leaves in his graceful retreat from the spotlight.Get tickets to One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest @ LAB111Get tickets to Jack of All Trades: The Best of Jack Nicholson @ LAB111

This week, hosts Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom take on three standout releases. Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, a quirky biopic starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as MMA legend Mark Kerr, prompts the question: did it really deserve a fifteen-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival?To celebrate its 40th anniversary, Robert Zemeckis’s blockbuster classic Back to the Future returns, as Laura and Elliot debate whether Marty McFly’s story is truly as relatable as we think.Finally, they unpack Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, the Palme d’Or–winning film made secretly in defiance of the Iranian regime, which continues to censor and punish Panahi for his bold filmmaking.Get tickets to The Smashing Machine @ LAB111Get tickets to Back To The Future @ LAB111Get tickets to It Was Just An Accident @ LAB111

The American New Wave, or New Hollywood, launched the careers of some of the United States’ most iconic filmmakers, from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. But what was this era, when studios granted directors unprecedented creative freedom, really about, and what did it reveal about 1970s America?Hosts Elliot Bloom and Tom Ooms dive into this transformative period, discussing the quintessential elements of the movement while spotlighting cult heroes like Robert Altman and John Cassavetes and overlooked filmmakers such as Barbara Loden and Elaine May. They also ask whether today’s social and political climate in the United States could spark a new wave of radical cinema.Get tickets to ⁠New Hollywood: The Films of The American New Wave⁠ @ LAB111

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia follows two conspiracy-obsessed men who kidnap a powerful CEO, convinced she’s an alien bent on destroying Earth. Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons shine, but while host Laura Gommans revels in their performances, Elliot Bloom questions whether Lanthimos’s satire lands in the world we live in today.Plus, Kelly Reichardt joins Hugo Emmerzael to discuss The Mastermind — a stripped-down art heist film set in 1970s suburban America — and her collaboration with Josh O’Connor.Get tickets to Bugonia @ LAB111

In collaboration with Eye Filmmuseum’s exhibition Ongoing, celebrating the singular career of Tilda Swinton, Hugo Emmerzael sits down with filmmaker, writer, and lifelong cinephile Mark Cousins — Swinton’s longtime collaborator and one of cinema’s great chroniclers. Best known for The Story of Film and Women Make Film, which he created alongside Swinton, Cousins reflects on his wild years as a critic interviewing Hollywood legends in their homes, his boundless curiosity for the moving image, and how film endures as a universal language.Get tickets to Caravaggio @ LAB111

Few filmmakers explore desire with as much curiosity and elegance as Luca Guadagnino. His cinema doesn’t just show yearning, it makes us feel it. With After the Hunt now in cinemas, Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms trace how the great films of desire have shaped Guadagnino’s work, from the charged glances to the slow unraveling of restraint. But while Laura revels in the sensuality of his worlds, Tom questions the pretension that can often surround them, avoiding conflict. Together, they ask why cinema remains so obsessed with the ache of wanting, and where exactly the lines of attraction are drawn — both on screen and in ourselves.Get tickets to After The Hunt @ LAB111

Sven Bresser’s debut feature Rietland marks a striking moment for Dutch cinema — the first film in nearly 30 years to be selected for Cannes. This eerie, quietly devastating story follows a reed cutter whose discovery of a murdered girl’s body sets off an introspective search for truth, asking where violence really comes from — the world outside or something buried within. Set against the haunting stillness of the Dutch countryside, the film transforms landscape into witness.Speaking with producer Elliot Bloom, Bresser reflects on why he wanted to tell a story rooted in the land he grew up in, how local truths can hold universal weight, and why casting non-actors brought an essential honesty to the film. Together, they explore what makes Rietland resonate so deeply — both at home and far beyond The Netherlands.Get tickets to Rietland @ LAB111Get tickets to CC Film Club: Challengers @ LAB111

A lot can change in a week at the movies. One Battle After Another—the film we crowned as the year’s best—has stumbled at the box office, but does that tell the full story? Meanwhile, Dutch cinema is making international headlines, though for all the wrong reasons: AI actors. Alongside all this, new films demand our attention: Ari Aster returns with Eddington, a chaotic, unhinged attempt to wrestle with the Covid era, and Sven Bresser’s Rietland might just put The Netherlands back on the cinematic map. Hosts Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom have plenty to unpack.Get tickets to CC Film Club: Challengers @ LAB111Get tickets to Eddington @ LAB111Get tickets to Rietland @ LAB111Get tickets to Yi Yi @ LAB111Get tickets to One Battle After Another @ LAB111

Paul Thomas Anderson’s $130 million blockbuster might just be the film of the year. In this episode, Laura and Elliot dive into the action-packed, satirical drama while lamenting Leonardo DiCaprio’s phenomenal performance—brilliant on screen, morally dubious off it. They also revel in the timeless elegance of Yi Yi, recently restored and returned to the big screen by Odyssey Classics, and ask why the thriller Him couldn’t live up to the hype, even with Jordan Peele’s name on it.Get tickets to ⁠CC Film Club: Challengers⁠ @ LAB111Get tickets to One Battle After Another @ LAB111Get tickets to Yi Yi @ LAB111Get tickets to Him @ LAB111

What ever happened to the chick flick? At the turn of the millennium, this fizzy, unabashedly feminine genre ruled the box office and sleepovers alike, but somewhere along the way, it slipped out of fashion. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Clueless, now screening at LAB111, Kiriko Mechanicus and Tom Ooms revisit their favorite titles and try to define what a chick flick really is. From iconic gems to forgotten cult favorites, they explore the pleasures, pitfalls, and cultural baggage of the genre, asking whether we still need chick flicks today, or if they’re better left in the early 2000s with flip phones and frosted lip gloss.Get tickets to Clueless @ LAB111

Coinciding with our Viva Varda retrospective now playing at LAB111 in Amsterdam, Elliot and Kiriko celebrate the life and cinema of French filmmaker and feminist icon Agnès Varda. They discuss why Varda is Kiriko’s ultimate cinematic hero and how her films mirror the warmth, curiosity, and humour of the woman herself. Varda's approach to filmmaking is more than craft, it’s a way of seeing the world, a playful blueprint for us all to live by. Together, they unpack some of her classics and imagine how they might spend a single unforgettable day with Agnès Varda.Get tickets to Viva Varda: The Films of Agnès Varda @ LAB111

Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is a film made in the urgency of the present. Composed through a series of video calls with Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, it documents a life confined in Gaza during the current phase of Israel’s genocide. Speaking with producer Elliot Bloom, Sepideh reflects on why the film is essential at a moment when Palestinian voices are being silenced and when the daily struggle to survive is kept at a distance from the world.This conversation honors the remarkable presence of Fatima, the necessity of bearing witness, and the role of cinema and art in confronting horrors that resist comprehension.Get tickets to Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk @ LAB111Get tickets to CC Film Club: Charlie's Angels @ LAB111

In honor of its 50th anniversary, Jaws emerges from the depths of the cinematic sea to remind us why it remains the archetype of the summer blockbuster, forever shaping our fear of the ocean and giving sharks a bad rep. Join Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms as they dissect Spielberg’s masterstroke, from its thrilling mechanics to the happy accidents that made it an instant classic.This episode also explores the evolution of creature features, tracing how this genre once thrived on tangible, terrifying creatures—and why such films are rarely made the same way today. Get tickets to Jaws @ LAB111Get tickets to CC Film Club: Charlie's Angels @ LAB111

Back from a summer hiatus, Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom reunite to trade notes on the hot new releases. Zach Cregger’s hotly anticipated Weapons has horror fans buzzing—though for producer Elliot, he can only manage to watch it through his fingers. They also dive into Sorry, Baby, Eva Victor’s quietly devastating debut, a tender comedy-drama about how life insists on moving forward no matter what.Get your tickets to Weapons @ LAB111Get your tickets to Sorry, Baby @ LAB111

In this episode, Kiriko sits down with Dutch filmmaker Morgan Knibbe to discuss his blistering debut fictional feature The Garden of Earthly Delights—a formally audacious, emotionally harrowing portrait of the post-colonial legacy in the Philippines. Through a fictional lens, Knibbe confronts the ongoing violence of Western capitalism, power, and desire, exposing the devastating asymmetry between those who are seen and those who are never heard.But why has a film this urgent and unflinching been met with near silence? Kiriko and Morgan explore the limits of representation, the discomfort of telling hard truths, and the price artists pay for making the invisible visible.

This week on Review Roundup, host Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom head south for the summer with a sun-drenched revisit of Plein Soleil—René Clément’s slow-burning 1960 thriller that introduced the world to a dangerously magnetic Alain Delon, as we dip our toes into the Mr. Ripley universe.Alongside Clément’s shimmering noir, they spotlight more scorchers from LAB111’s Heatwave program—including Aftersun, The Parent Trap, and Do the Right Thing—to explore what keeps us coming back to summer cinema: the heat, the heartbreak, and the haze of memory...or just a good old AC system.Get tickets to Heatwave: Sweaty Summer Cinema program @ LAB111Get tickets to Kingdoms of Rain: The Films of Akira Kurosawa @ LAB111