In a moment when Hollywood is embracing the comeback — Demi Moore in The Substance, Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl — Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms turn their attention to the art of the revival. Why does the industry love to see actors return, transformed and triumphant? What does it say about audiences that we reward the narrative of reinvention so reliably? An episode that traces the comeback from Hollywood's golden age to the present — and asks whether the redemption arc is a story about the actor, or about us.
Hailed as the Citizen Kane of bad movies, The Room has transcended its origins as Tommy Wiseau's enigmatic vanity project to become a bona fide cult phenomenon. But how did it achieve such status — and what, beneath its layers of unintentional surrealism, is it really about? Hosts Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms unravel the film's bizarre legacy, offering an essential guide to its chaotic production and the question of whether something made without self-awareness can still be, in some profound sense, art.
When Parasite won Best Picture, it put Korean cinema in the global spotlight — but it was the result of decades of bold filmmaking. With Mickey 17 now in cinemas, Laura Gommans and Kiriko Mechanicus explore the bloody brilliance of the Korean New Wave: a cinema shaped by the country's turbulent history, uncensored and unafraid. They examine Korea's obsession with vengeance as a structural principle, and why this cinema speaks so powerfully to global audiences who may know nothing about its specific political context.
Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael are at odds over Mickey 17 — Bong Joon-ho's English-language follow-up to Parasite — which puts them in the position of asking whether a director's intelligence translates when the production scale changes. They're in complete agreement about Mike Leigh's Hard Truths, which steals the episode. And Brazilian awards contender I'm Still Here sparks a heated debate about Oscar bait — is it manipulation or a worthy film that simply deserves recognition? A Review Roundup in which disagreement is the point.
Oz Perkins has become horror cinema's most interesting director — and The Monkey, his latest, leaves Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael with a productive ambivalence: is he a filmmaker who can't land an ending, or is the open ending the whole point? The episode also brings dispatches from Cannes, where Hugo spoke with Jia Zhang-ke about Caught by the Tides — a film Hugo finds transcendental and Laura suspects might be slightly too pleased with itself. A Review Roundup in which the conversation is the discovery.
With a new wave of nostalgia-driven musical biopics — A Complete Unknown, Better Man, Maria — flooding theatres, hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael ask what it actually takes to make a great one. A genre weighed down by its own well-worn narrative bingo card, the musical biopic too often settles for a greatest-hits retelling rather than embracing the strangeness of the artist at its centre. An episode about why the form keeps failing its subjects — and what the rare exceptions do differently.
The first Review Roundup: Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom on The Brutalist — Brady Corbet's Academy Award-nominated epic — and whether the AI controversy surrounding its post-production changes anything about the film's achievement. The episode also considers Pablo Larrain's Maria, which attempts an MCU-style crossover of prestige biopics to mixed results, and revisits Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour — back in cinemas and as provocative and hypnotic as it was on first release. Three films, one consistent question: what do we watch for?
A personal essay by Laura Gommans about being a goth teenager who fell for Spike from Buffy without fully understanding why — and what she understands now. The vampire, Laura argues, is the cinema figure who most perfectly captures the adolescent experience of feeling like an outcast, of experiencing desire as transgressive, of wanting to live forever in a world that keeps trying to kill you. With Nosferatu back in cinemas and the vampire resurgent across streaming, an essay about why this figure refuses to die.
Robert Eggers's Nosferatu returns the vampire to its original horror — but why does the vampire keep returning at all? Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms trace the creature from Murnau to Twilight, from Universal monsters to Hammer Horror to the elegant melancholy of Let the Right One In. What do our vampire films say about sexuality, class, immigration, and the fear of the body that refuses to stay dead? An episode that takes genre seriously as a form of cultural self-examination, and finds the vampire more revealing than it has any right to be.
To celebrate the 15th anniversary of Coraline, Laura Gommans speaks with director Henry Selick about his illustrious career and lifelong love for cinema. From childhood terrors at his aunt's house to being transfixed by the cyclops in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Selick reveals the origins of his eerie yet tender storytelling style. A conversation about stop-motion animation as a form of commitment — the conviction required to build a world by hand, frame by frame — and why the films that frighten children are so often the ones they carry into adulthood.
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