Celebrating Cinema

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...

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...

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, humano...

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...

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 T...

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, i...

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 cri...

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 relati...

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 Hitch...

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 kno...

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...