Episodes

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.

A pre-Christmas review roundup that lingers on three films deserving more attention than they’ve received. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value — a quiet companion to The Worst Person in the World — is everything you’d want from a Trier winter film. Harris Dickerson’s debut Urchin announces a new voice in British cinema. And Rose Byrne turns in one of the year’s most undervalued performances in a film that, like the best gifts, arrives without adequate warning. Plus: the festive season, the cinema programme, and the argument about what to watch on Christmas Eve.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine — a biopic about MMA legend Mark Kerr, starring Dwayne Johnson — received a fifteen-minute standing ovation at Venice. Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom want to know why. The episode also celebrates the 40th anniversary of Back to the Future — a film whose internal logic holds up rather better than some of us remember — and closes with It Was Just an Accident: a quieter film that rewards exactly the kind of patience we usually reserve for Hollywood’s louder proclamations.

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.

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.