From the alien drifter of The Man Who Fell to Earth to the unforgettable Goblin King of Labyrinth, David Bowie built a film career as singular as his music career and considerably less discussed. Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms trace Bowie's relationship with cinema across four decades — what drew him to the screen, what he was doing that other musicians who attempted acting were not, and why certain performances (The Prestige, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence) hold up as genuine acting rather than celebrity appearances. An episode about a complete artist who kept finding new forms to inhabit.
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at nineteen, and cinema has been retelling it ever since — mostly getting it wrong. Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms ask the central question: is the monster a misunderstood outcast, an abandoned child who never asked to exist, or a cautionary tale about men who play God? And more urgently: why is he always ugly when the novel never required it? Tracing the monster through James Whale's 1931 original, Hammer Horror, and The Bride — an episode about what we've done to a story that was always, at its heart, about responsibility.
Cultural critic Esje Seigfried joins Laura Gommans twenty years after Brokeback Mountain to ask what queer cinema inherited from Ang Lee's devastating film — and what it's still working to move beyond. The genre's history of tragedy as default, of grief as proof of love's seriousness: has queer cinema found its way to other kinds of stories? From Happy Together to Heartstopper, an episode about the right to a wider emotional range — and the persistent question of whether the actors performing queer love need to be queer themselves.
Park Chan-wook may have made his masterpiece. Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael break down No Other Choice — a film that uses the thriller genre to dissect middle-class aspiration, debt, and the slow violence of economic systems — and find it operating at the level of Park's best Korean work. The episode also weighs in on the Oscar nominations and marks the 45th anniversary of Kubrick's The Shining — a film, they argue, that Kubrick would have made differently today, and that Stephen King was always right to resist.
The death of Brigitte Bardot — screen legend, vocal far-right sympathiser — reignites the question that contemporary culture keeps failing to resolve: can we separate the art from the artist? Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael approach the question as critics with a responsibility to their own viewing practices. From Polanski to Leni Riefenstahl, from cancel culture's logic to the history of artists whose lives were monstrous and whose work mattered: what do we owe our own aesthetic experiences — and what do we owe the people those artists harmed?
Chloé Zhao's Hamnet — a film about Shakespeare and grief — becomes the occasion for a wider excavation: the movies that are, secretly or openly, adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. From 10 Things I Hate About You to Ran, from She's Gotta Have It to The Lion King, Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael trace the persistent hold of the plays on cinema's imagination. The episode also finds space for Richard Linklater's Blue Moon — and the discovery that Ethan Hawke is magnetic in just about anything he chooses to be in.
In a special episode responding to audience suggestions from LAB111's Lab Suggestions programme, Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzaal discuss the chilling specificity of Children of Men — a film that imagines social collapse not through spectacle but through exhaustion and bureaucratic drift. The episode also stages a pointed debate about whether Christopher Nolan's Inception is an original work or an acknowledged debt to Satoshi Kon's Paprika. Along the way: conversations with Colin Farrell and Alfonso Cuarón, and why some films age into prophecy.
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 — and ask why so many films from major directors felt surprisingly average this year. They also spotlight a handful of remarkable titles that never reached Dutch cinemas but deserve far more attention. Essential listening for anyone who wants to understand what actually mattered at the movies in 2025.
Laura Gommans is an unabashed devotee of festive films. Kiriko Mechanicus prefers her Christmas viewing eyes-wide-open — more Eyes Wide Shut than Love Actually. Together they interrogate what festive actually means when applied to cinema — why certain films feel like December when they contain no snow and no gifts — and dream up the directors who should, in a just world, be commissioned to make a holiday film. An episode about the seasonality of cinema, the films that become rituals, and whether tradition is a comfort or a trap.
A Review Roundup in which Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom find themselves genuinely divided. Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love — Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson in an unflinching portrait of postpartum collapse — splits them down the middle. They're similarly at odds on Splitsville, a physical comedy about opening up a marriage. But both are fully won over by Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague: a playful, formally audacious retelling of the making of A Bout de Souffle in the grammar of the French New Wave it celebrates. An episode where disagreement is the conversation.
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