The American New Wave — New Hollywood — gave us Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, and Altman. But what was this era really about, beyond the career highlights? Elliot Bloom and Tom Ooms trace how a generation of film-school graduates, shaped by the French New Wave and disillusioned by the studio system, were handed the keys at exactly the moment the studios had run out of ideas. From Easy Rider to Apocalypse Now: an episode about the conditions that produce a golden age, and why those conditions are almost impossible to recreate deliberately.
Join Elliot Bloom and Tom Ooms on a cinematic road trip through the films of Wim Wenders — timed to LAB111's Drifters and Dreamers retrospective and the stunning 4K restoration of Paris, Texas. From Wings of Desire to Perfect Days, the episode explores the recurring themes of transience, memory, and the search for belonging that define Wenders's work. An episode about a filmmaker who has spent fifty years asking what it means to be at home in the world — and why cinema is the only form spacious enough to hold the question.
Orson Welles stands as a visionary filmmaker, a notorious showman, and an enigmatic storyteller who blurred the lines between fact and fiction throughout his life. Tom Ooms and Elliot Bloom dive deep into the life and legend of one of America's most celebrated yet elusive filmmakers. Timed to the re-releases of The Third Man and F for Fake at LAB111, an episode about a filmmaker who made ambiguity his method and audacity his only consistent rule — and what it cost him in Hollywood.
A personal essay about the specific seduction of David Fincher’s films — beginning with a line from Fight Club the author still uses to calm herself down. What is it about Fincher’s protagonists, these obsessive, brilliant, deeply damaged men, that makes them so compelling to follow? The essay traces this fascination through Se7en, Zodiac, and The Social Network: an honest account of falling for a filmmaker whose films are, on close examination, about the very seduction they enact on their audience.
Beginning with a high-school encounter with Le Petit Prince and the word ephemere, this essay builds toward a question that cinema has been circling for decades: what is it about Tilda Swinton? An actor who refuses categorisation, who seems to occupy a different ontological register from the other bodies on screen, who makes every film she appears in feel as though it’s been waiting for her specifically. An essay about ineffability — about how some performances can’t be described, only pointed at.
For over 40 years, movie fans have eagerly awaited the arrival of summer and the Hollywood blockbusters that defined it. From Jaws to Star Wars to The Dark Knight, the summer blockbuster has been both a commercial institution and a cultural ritual — and its history tells the story of Hollywood itself. This essay traces the evolution of the blockbuster from its origins in the 1970s to the present, asking what the summer season reveals about what audiences want from cinema, and whether the golden age of the event movie is behind us.
But even if ‘retro’ has replaced ‘renaissance’ and, like Hugo put it rather eloquently, mainstream filmmaking can sometimes feel like a calzone of familiar ideas being folded on top of each other over and over again, we shouldn’t condemn our personal sense of nostalgia for the films that we remember so longingly, and in some cases rather naively, helped shape who we are as grown ups.
What should be a light-hearted reflection on the films of nightmares & nostalgia, which helped form our presenters and their viewing habits, quickly reveals itself to be a psychoanalysis of the 3 different approaches to parenting and movie-watching. If that is not enough drama for you, Tom returns with even more lists, reflecting on the best and worse rehashing in cinema as well as considering what the future may entail. If you have more questions you’d like us to discuss, or stories worth sharing then send us an email.
As I lie here waiting for these lonesome, dreadful days to pass, pacing the cage of my homely confines, flipping through my film collection and returning time and time again to the same classics I’ve watched dozens of times, I began to wonder what it is that I miss so much about the cinema.
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