Episodes

Few filmmakers translate longing into texture the way Luca Guadagnino does — the specific warmth of sunlight on skin, the tactility of a meal, the charge between people who haven’t touched yet. With After the Hunt in cinemas, Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms trace how desire functions across Guadagnino’s filmography: from the peach scene of Call Me by Your Name to the sensory overload of Challengers. Tom pushes back on the aestheticism; Laura revels in it. Between them, they locate exactly what Guadagnino is doing — and why it works.

Sven Bresser’s debut feature Rietland is the first Dutch film selected for Cannes in nearly thirty years — an eerie, unhurried drama about a reed cutter who discovers a murdered girl’s body and finds the investigation turning inward. Speaking with Elliot, Bresser discusses what it means to make a first film that transforms landscape into moral witness, where the stillness of the Dutch countryside becomes the medium through which a question about violence is asked without being answered. A conversation about a new voice in Dutch cinema and what it takes to see clearly.

One Battle After Another — recently crowned film of the year — has stumbled at the box office: what does that tell us about the gap between critical enthusiasm and audience appetite? Meanwhile, Dutch cinema makes international headlines for AI actors. New films arrive demanding attention: Ari Aster’s Eddington, an unhinged attempt to dramatise the Covid era that Laura and Elliot find both infuriating and fascinating; Sven Bresser’s Rietland — quiet, precise, important; and Tilly Norwood, a film that sneaks up on you when you least expect it.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s $130 million satirical blockbuster might be the film of the year — and Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom dive into its pleasures while sitting with the discomfort of Leonardo DiCaprio’s off-screen conduct. Meanwhile, Yi Yi — Edward Yang’s masterpiece, newly restored by Odyssey Classics — returns to exactly the screen it deserves, and they ask why it took this long. The episode rounds out with Jordan Peele-produced thriller Him, which prompts a debate about whether a name can carry a film further than the film itself is willing to go.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Clueless — now back at LAB111 — Kiriko Mechanicus and Tom Ooms revisit the chick flick in all its fizzy, complicated, often underestimated glory. What is a chick flick, exactly? Who decides? And was the genre’s disappearance a loss to cinema or a liberation from a label designed to diminish it? Moving through Clueless, Legally Blonde, and a range of cult favourites, they argue about what the genre was really doing when it was at its best — and why it refuses to stay gone.

Coinciding with the Viva Varda retrospective at LAB111, Elliot and Kiriko celebrate the life and cinema of Agnes Varda — the filmmaker who refused every category the industry tried to put her in, from the French New Wave to documentary cinema to video art. They discuss why Varda is Kiriko’s ultimate cinematic hero, how her films mirror the warmth, curiosity, and humour of the woman herself, and why her approach to looking at the world — camera in hand, genuinely interested in whoever is in front of her — remains the most radical thing in cinema.

Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk was made through a series of video calls with Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, conducted during Israel’s assault on Gaza. The film is an act of witness as much as an act of cinema — a record of a life lived under conditions that most audiences will struggle to comprehend, made with the urgency of knowing the record might be all that remains. Speaking with Elliot, Farsi discusses why making this film was necessary and what it means to document survival in real time.

In honour of Jaws’s 50th anniversary, Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms dissect Spielberg’s masterstroke — from its thrilling mechanics to the happy accidents that made it an instant classic. The film that invented the summer blockbuster also happened to launch one of cinema’s great careers, and this episode asks what it actually takes to make an audience afraid of something they cannot see. The episode also explores the wider history of the creature feature: the films that gave us our most primal cinematic fears, and why we keep going back for more.

Back from a summer hiatus, Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom reunite to trade notes on the hot new releases. Zach Cregger’s Weapons has horror fans buzzing — though producer Elliot can only manage to watch it through his fingers. They also dive into Sorry, Baby, Eva Victor’s quietly devastating debut: a tender comedy-drama about how life insists on moving forward no matter what it asks you to leave behind. An episode that finds Celebrating Cinema back in its rhythm, arguing about films it genuinely cares about.

Dutch filmmaker Morgan Knibbe sits down with Kiriko to discuss The Garden of Earthly Delights — his debut fictional feature, a formally audacious and emotionally harrowing portrait of the post-colonial legacy in the Philippines. Through a fictional lens, Knibbe confronts the ongoing violence of Western capitalism and the devastating asymmetry between those who hold power and those who bear its consequences. An episode about what it means to make a film in a country that isn’t yours, and why fiction can sometimes tell a truer story than documentary.