Celebrating Cinema

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 d...

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 gener...

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 thi...

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 ow...

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 Ell...

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 thrille...

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. Mo...

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,...

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? Th...

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 bo...

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 w...

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...

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...

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 wit...

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...

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 t...

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, unfil...

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....

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 m...

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 strikin...

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 fest...

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 revis...

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 N...

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...

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...