Celebrating Cinema

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?

They trace the monster on screen through James Whale's Universal original in 1931, Hammer Horror's gloriously excessive franchise — essentially the Marvel Universe before Marvel existed — and into modern Frankenstein-by-another-name films like Ex Machina and Blade Runner. Plus reviews of the two new adaptations, Frankenstein and The Bride, putting the myth back in the spotlight.

Also: Laura confesses to having seen Fifty Shades Darker in the cinema three times and to watching Arrival at the gym. This is relevant. Kind of.

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Listen back to The Immortal Cinema of Bloodsuckers And Nightstalkers

Listen back to Why Zombies Refuse To Die

Listen back to How Sex And The City 2 Maps The Rise And Fall Of American Empire

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 borders and belonging into something deeply, unavoidably human. Because for anyone who has ever lived between cultures, cinema isn't just art — it's a second home.

This episode is part of Diaspora Diaries, LAB111's curated season running January through March exploring stories of movement, identity, and belonging on the big screen.

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Listen back to Why Wim Wenders?

Listen back to Can We Still Watch Films By Bad People?

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 what it means to carry the ethos of the dancefloor into cinema. Rather than sanitising rave culture, he was determined to preserve its rawness.

Together they explore how to craft a score that doesn’t simply underscore the image but unsettles it They also discuss shaping the sonic textures of the landscape itself and why rave on film has so often felt like a betrayal of the culture it tries to depict.

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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 value instead of getting caught up in manufactured controversy. Meanwhile, Laura traces the evolution of movie marketin, from the event-cinema spectacle of Jaws and Jurassic Park to the viral mythmaking of The Blair Witch Project, into today’s algorithm-driven campaigns built on shock, virality, and off-screen narratives.

Together they discuss how in an era of social media spectacle, are studios selling us the film—or the conversation around it?

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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 explore the queer stories we want to see more of, and whether it really matters if a straight actor plays a queer role.

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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 with Stephen King’s vision, and why Kubrick would have loved TikTok film debates.

Get tickets to No Other Choice

Get tickets to The Shining

Get tickets to Film Lecture: How To Build A Haunted Hotel?

Get tickets to Drink-Along: The Fall

Get tickets to Brazil Beneath The Surface

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 Cinema, hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael reflect on their own responsibilities as viewers and critics. They discuss whether watching films by “bad people” can still offer insight into the art and the person behind it, and whether cinema can act as a space to confront difficult ideas rather than retreat from them.

If the work already exists, what does critical engagement look like—and do we watch films for their politics, their artistry, or something more complicated?

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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 to be missed, as well as the endearing documentary Tale of Sylian.

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Get tickets to Fight The Power: Goodbye Julia @ LAB111

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, unfiltered reality. As they unpack Chernov’s almost video game–like sense of movement and immersion, the conversation opens up into a bigger question: are documentaries showing us something that contemporary fiction films are struggling to capture?

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Listen to Documentary Ethics w/ Miriam Guttman

Listen to The Estactic Truth: The Films of Werner Herzog

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.

Along the way, they share tidbits from conversations with Colin Farrell and Alfonso Cuarón, plus a voice note from one of our listeners whose pick, The NeverEnding Story, is heading to the big screen.

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Get tickets to Hamnet @ LAB111

Get tickets to The Actor’s Archive: Jane Fonda @ LAB111

Get tickets to Fight The Power: Goodbye Julia @ LAB111