Celebrating Cinema

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 @ LAB111

Get tickets to Film Lecture: My Film Is Vietnam @ LAB111

Get tickets to Can't Get You Out of My Head: Films of Obsession @ LAB111

Get 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 @ LAB111

Get tickets to Girls in Film Presents: Behind The Scenes of Motherhood @ LAB111

The 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 Letterboxd

Listen 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 @ LAB111

Send your hot takes to [email protected]

Follow 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 @ LAB111

Follow 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 @ LAB111

Get tickets to Dead Man's Wire @ LAB111

Get tickets to ⁠The History of Sound⁠ @ LAB111

Get tickets to The Third Man @ LAB111

Follow 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 @ LAB111

Follow us on Letterboxd

Films 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 @ LAB111

Films 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)