Celebrating Cinema

Hollywood loves a remake. But why take a film that already works and make it all over again? Host Laura Gommans sits down with LAB111’s Head of Cinema, Tom Ooms, to dig into Hollywood’s habit of reworking films from around the world and what happens when it gets its hands on someone else’s story. From Masayuki Suô’s Shall We Dance? and its Richard Gere-starring remake to Funny Games , The Vanishin...

What can cinema really fix? In The Beloved , Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen ( The Beasts , Mother ) explores the complicated relationship between a powerful film director and his estranged daughter, using the filmmaking process itself to examine questions of identity, domination and abandonment. In conversation with film critic Hugo Emmerzael, Sorogoyen discusses turning the camera on cinema...

In 2007, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story tore the music biopic apart so thoroughly that Hollywood should never have been able to make one with a straight face again. It flopped. Since then, we’ve had Bohemian Rhapsody , Rocketman , Elvis and, this year, Michael . So what went wrong? For the latest Cine of the Times , film critic Hugo Emmerzael and media scholar Dan Hassler-Forest revisit Jake Kasda...

For forty years, Tom Cruise has sold us one thing: a man who will not stop running. In Digger (2026), Alejandro G. Iñárritu casts him as an oil tycoon in prosthetics, only for the trailer to remind us of every Tom Cruise who came before. What happens when the ultimate movie star tries to disappear into a role? Laura Gommans and producer Elliot Bloom take Digger as a starting point to ask whether a...

From Paul Verhoeven to Hoyte van Hoytema to Halina Reijn, Dutch filmmakers have made a mark far beyond the Netherlands. But why doesn’t Dutch cinema travel as far as the talent it produces? For this Nederlands Film Festival special, Celebrating Cinema host Elliot Bloom speaks with actor Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing, director Mees Peijnenburg and producer Leontine Petit, who co-produced the Oscar-nominated...

For this Nederlands Film Festival special, Kiriko Mechanicus meets two rising Dutch filmmakers who use cinema to get closer to people and histories — and to find out what lies beyond what they already know. Amanda van Hesteren's Dagen met Blue is built around the trust between filmmaker and subject. Kiriko chats to Amanda about her fascination with people in all their colours, how she creates...

How did 9/11 change Hollywood and when does entertainment become propaganda? Marking 25 years since 9/11 and coinciding with LAB111’s Manufacturing Consent programme, Elliot Bloom and film critic Hugo Emmerzael trace cinema’s long relationship with propaganda and political power. From revolutionary montage and The Battle of Algiers to Black Hawk Down , Zero Dark Thirty and Iron Man , they look at...

Thirty-five years after Terminator 2: Judgment Day , cinema is still imagining the end of the world through killer machines, nuclear war, viruses and alien invasions. But did one of the greatest blockbusters ever made teach us to imagine the apocalypse all wrong? With Terminator 2 returning to our screens in 4K, producer Elliot Bloom and filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus ask why cinema is so obsessed wi...

“My mother and cinema are my two teachers in life, each in their own peculiar ways.” Filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus and producer Elliot Bloom explore the parallels between these two teachers: the women who raise us, and the films that show us how to live, love and understand the world. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary and re-release of Cría Cuervos , they look at a series of films from the 1970s...

In 2007, the Coen Brothers made a thriller set in 1980 that somehow captured an American dread that hadn't fully arrived yet. Critic Hugo Emmerzael and academic Dan Hassler-Forest return to No Country for Old Men — the coin toss, the deaths that happen offscreen, the sheriff who solves nothing — to ask how a film everybody already loves quietly called the next twenty years. Hugo and Dan get in...

We’re constantly told to slow down and be present, but what does it actually mean to pay attention when so much of modern life is designed to scatter it? This summer, French auteur Jacques Tati returns to LAB111 in six newly restored 4K classics, including his magnum opus PlayTime . Few filmmakers have looked at modern life with Tati’s comic precision: traffic becomes choreography, bureaucracy bec...

What makes a film camp? Is it something filmmakers create, or something audiences discover? To celebrate Pride Month and LAB111's Camp, Cult & Queer programme, filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus is joined by film programmer Alicia Bergamelli to unpack one of cinema's most elusive ideas. Drawing on Susan Sontag's famous essay Notes on "Camp" , they explore where camp came from, w...

Who gets to tell a story? And who gets to see themselves reflected on screen? Sixty years after its release, Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl ( La Noire de... , 1966) remains one of the defining works of African cinema. Restored in 4K and re-released by Odyssey Classics for its anniversary, Sembène's groundbreaking debut follows Diouana, a young Senegalese woman who travels to France believing...

Some filmmakers don't just make great films, they change who cinema is for. 60 years ago, Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl ( La Noire de... ) announced a new cinematic voice to the world. Through the story of a young Senegalese woman working for a French family, Sembène exposed the brutal realities of colonialism while proving that African stories could—and should—be told on their own terms. To mark t...

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...

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...