(entertainment journalist)
(film critic)
(film maker)
(film programmer)
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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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. They also explore why so many films from major directors felt surprisingly average this year and spotlight a handful of remarkable titles that never reached Dutch cinemas but deserve far more attention. Share your own favourite films of 2025 and join the conversation.
In this final review roundup before the festive season, hosts Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom take a look at some new releases that should be on your radar this winter. Joachim Trier returns with Sentimental Value, a film about filmmaking and a tender companion to his celebrated feature The Worst Person in the World. Harris Dickerson steps behind the camera for the first time with Urchin, a striking debut anchored by a magnetic performance from Frank Dillane.
Rose Byrne offers one of the most moving turns of her career as she navigates the weight of single parenthood in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I Would Kick You. Finally, Left Handed Girl from Shih Ching Tsou offers a quietly affecting study of intimacy as it traces the intertwined lives of a mother and her two daughters, shaped through Tsou’s long standing creative partnership with Sean Baker.
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Host Laura Gommans, an unabashed devotee of festive films, teams up with Kiriko, who prefers her Christmas viewing a little more Eyes Wide Shut than Love Actually. Together they unpack what truly makes a film “festive,” trade beloved classics and oddball alternatives, and dream up which directors should (or absolutely shouldn’t) make a holiday movie. As they share how cinema shapes their own festive traditions.
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Sex and the City may not be canonical cinema, but as a cultural artefact it charts America’s imperial confidence, and its slow, chaotic unravelling, with uncanny precision. After finally submitting to the franchise this year, host Hugo Emmerzael became obsessed, culminating in his Little White Lies piece “Sex and the City 2 and the End of America.”
In this episode, Hugo and Kiriko Mechanicus revisit the original series, the two films, and And Just Like That…, tracing how a once-aspirational guide to modern living morphed into something more deranged, unhinged and somehow more American than ever. What emerges is a sharp, fast-moving portrait of how over three decades of shifting national fantasies found their reflection in one of pop culture’s most unlikely mirrors.
Read Hugo’s Article
In this review roundup, hosts Laura Gommans and producer Elliot Bloom find themselves divided on Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, a fierce, unflinching portrait of postpartum collapse starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. Laura and Elliot are also split on Splitsville, a buoyant physical comedy about the messiness of opening up a marriage. But both are fully won over by Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, a playful reframing of the making of À Bout de Souffle told in the grammar of the French New Wave itself.
Laura also speaks with Maxi Meissner, curator of Schmutz Cinema, about what audiences can expect from Schmutz XL: The Birthday Edition on December 6th , a special LAB111 collaboration celebrating queer intimacy and pleasure on screen.
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To mark the 50th-anniversary rerelease of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, hosts Hugo Emmerzael and Tom Ooms revisit the career of the man at the center of its enduring power: Jack Nicholson. In this episode, they explore how Nicholson’s performances, volatile and mischievous yet remarkably controlled, forged a style of American screen acting entirely his own.
From his countercultural rise in the late ’60s to the defining roles that secured his place as a cinema icon, Hugo and Tom examine the man behind the myth, the craft behind the charisma, and the legacy Nicholson leaves in his graceful retreat from the spotlight.
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This week, hosts Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom take on three standout releases. Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, a quirky biopic starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as MMA legend Mark Kerr, prompts the question: did it really deserve a fifteen-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival?
To celebrate its 40th anniversary, Robert Zemeckis’s blockbuster classic Back to the Future returns, as Laura and Elliot debate whether Marty McFly’s story is truly as relatable as we think.
Finally, they unpack Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, the Palme d’Or–winning film made secretly in defiance of the Iranian regime, which continues to censor and punish Panahi for his bold filmmaking.
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The American New Wave, or New Hollywood, launched the careers of some of the United States’ most iconic filmmakers, from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. But what was this era, when studios granted directors unprecedented creative freedom, really about, and what did it reveal about 1970s America?
Hosts Elliot Bloom and Tom Ooms dive into this transformative period, discussing the quintessential elements of the movement while spotlighting cult heroes like Robert Altman and John Cassavetes and overlooked filmmakers such as Barbara Loden and Elaine May. They also ask whether today’s social and political climate in the United States could spark a new wave of radical cinema.
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In collaboration with Eye Filmmuseum’s exhibition Ongoing, celebrating the singular career of Tilda Swinton, Hugo Emmerzael sits down with filmmaker, writer, and lifelong cinephile Mark Cousins — Swinton’s longtime collaborator and one of cinema’s great chroniclers.
Best known for The Story of Film and Women Make Film, which he created alongside Swinton, Cousins reflects on his wild years as a critic interviewing Hollywood legends in their homes, his boundless curiosity for the moving image, and how film endures as a universal language.
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