Social media has decided that both Marty Supreme and Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights are Films That Must Be Discussed — but are they worth the discourse they've generated? Hugo Emmerzael questions whether the outrage over Heathcliff's latest reimagining deserves our energy, suggesting the film may be more interesting when taken at face value. Meanwhile, Laura traces the marketing machinery behind Marty Supreme and asks: at what point does the anticipation become the experience — and does the film survive that pressure?
Sirat — Óliver Laxe's Cannes entry — follows a father searching for his daughter through a world dissolving into rave and borderland and bass. DJ and film composer Kangding Ray joins Hugo Emmerzael to discuss the specific challenge of carrying rave culture's ethos into cinema without sanitising it, and what it means to build a film around sound as primary sensation. A conversation between two artists who work in immersion — one in clubs, one on screen — about what happens when the dancefloor becomes the cinema.
Sex and the City 2 is not canonical cinema — and yet, as Hugo Emmerzael argues in his Little White Lies essay, it charts America's imperial confidence and its slow, chaotic unravelling with uncanny precision. In conversation with Kiriko Mechanicus, Hugo revisits the franchise's trajectory from scrappy New York comedy to global luxury spectacle — and asks what it means that its most derided sequel is also its most accidentally revealing document of empire at the point of peak hubris.
Timed to the 50th anniversary re-release of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hugo Emmerzael and Tom Ooms sit with the career of the most charismatic American screen actor of his generation. Jack Nicholson's performances — volatile, mischievous, and beneath the surface remarkably controlled — forged a style of acting entirely his own: the man who made wickedness feel like freedom. From his countercultural emergence in Easy Rider to Chinatown, The Shining, and As Good as It Gets: an episode about what it means to be a movie star rather than merely an actor.
In collaboration with Eye Filmmuseum's exhibition Ongoing — celebrating the singular career of Tilda Swinton — Hugo Emmerzael sits down with filmmaker and cinema obsessive Mark Cousins. Best known for The Story of Film and Women Make Film, which he created alongside Swinton herself, Cousins reflects on his years as a critic conducting interviews in Hollywood legends' homes, his boundless curiosity for the moving image, and what a decades-long creative partnership with someone as singular as Swinton actually looks like from the inside.
Reporting from the Croisette, host Hugo Emmerzael joins fellow critic Savina Petkova to reflect on two unforgettable selections from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value, led by a luminous Renate Reinsve, is a quietly devastating meditation on memory and emotional inheritance. A dispatch from the world's most important film festival — what it looks like from inside the blur of screenings and industry spectacle, and what actually stays with you when you leave the Croisette.
Did audiences jump the gun on Alex Garland's Warfare? Before its release, the brutally realist portrait of America's war in Iraq was deemed just another army recruitment movie — but Hugo Emmerzael and Laura Gommans definitely don't see it that way. Also: Gia Coppola's The Last Showgirl gives Pamela Anderson a tender, neon-lit comeback, but did it warrant the awards hype? Plus a conversation that cuts to the heart of what separates a genuinely anti-war film from one that merely depicts war.
An essay by Hugo Emmerzael — obsessively devoted to Van Morrison, Neil Young, and somehow in the top 0.01% of Randy Newman listeners — on what it would actually take to make a musical biopic that doesn’t betray its subject. With A Complete Unknown, Better Man, and Maria all recent in the memory, this piece traces the generic trap that makes most biopics feel like greatest-hits compilations, and asks whether the form can ever be as strange and alive as the music it’s supposedly celebrating.
Following a packed-out CC Film Club screening of Knight of Cups, Hugo Emmerzael chats with Tom van der Linden — creator of the acclaimed YouTube channel Like Stories of Old, which combines media analysis with personal reflection in video essays viewed by millions. Together they explore this often-overlooked Terrence Malick film: its dreamlike structure, its relationship to loss and desire, and what it means to make a film that refuses to explain itself. An episode about how to watch a Malick film, and why some films require you to surrender your critical defences before they open.
One of LAB111's resident filmmakers opened the Netherlands Film Festival with her debut feature — a film that began as documentary and became something harder to categorise. Witte Flits follows the real-life debate around euthanasia for unbearable psychological suffering, asking whether the theoretical right survives contact with reality. In conversation with Hugo, Laura Hermanides reflects on what it costs to change form midway through a project, and what it means to follow a story wherever it needs to go — even when the destination is harder than the journey.
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