Celebrating Cinema

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...

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 transform...

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 stri...

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 c...

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 qu...

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...

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 wrestl...

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...

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 iconi...

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 worl...

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 bein...

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 exp...

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 wh...

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...

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 A...

This week, Elliot and Kiriko dive into the legendary world of Akira Kurosawa—Japan’s master filmmaker and, let’s be honest, probably your favorite director’s favorite director. From samurai epics like Seven Samurai and Rashomon to powerful character dramas like Ikiru and High and Low , Kurosawa knew how to tell a story that hits you in the heart and keeps you on the edge of your seat. They unpack...