Episodes

Akira Kurosawa is the director most likely to be cited as a direct influence by the directors everyone else is citing as influences. Elliot and Kiriko trace the specific quality of his filmmaking — the rain, the violence, the moral ambiguity that never resolves into certainty — through Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Ikiru, and High and Low. What does Kurosawa do with the question of truth that makes it feel different from any other filmmaker’s answer? And what does it mean that his visual language has been absorbed so completely by world cinema that we sometimes forget where it came from?

With 28 Years Later lurching toward the screen, Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms revisit the undead legacy of the zombie in cinema — a genre that, much like its subject, refuses to stay buried. From its roots in early 20th-century depictions of Haitian slavery to its reinvention as a metaphor for mass consumption, pandemic anxiety, and societal collapse, the zombie has shuffled through countless cultural moments and kept finding new things to mean. An episode about a genre that is always, somehow, about right now.

On the 30th anniversary of Dogme 95 — the movement that stripped cinema back to handheld cameras, natural light, and no genre conventions — Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom ask what the manifesto was actually for, and what its legacy has been. The occasion is also the release of Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, which only reinforces the all style, no substance critique. And David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is coming to LAB111 — an episode that asks what happens when television is invaded by cinema’s most committed formalist.

Reporting from the Croisette, host Hugo Emmerzael joins fellow critic Savina Petkova to reflect on two unforgettable selections from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, led by a luminous Renate Reinsve, is a quietly devastating meditation on memory and emotional inheritance. A dispatch from the world’s most important film festival — what it looks like from inside the blur of screenings and industry spectacle, and what actually stays with you when you leave the Croisette.

To coincide with LAB111’s full Wes Anderson retrospective, Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms rank every film in his filmography — from Bottle Rocket to Asteroid City — asking what distinguishes the best Wes Anderson from the most easily caricatured version. Is it all style and no substance, or is there something genuinely felt beneath the symmetrical compositions? Elliot, established sceptic, adds his perspective from offscreen. Laura argues that one of Anderson’s most celebrated films doesn’t have enough colour. Tom disagrees.

In this Review Roundup, Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom dive into the re-release of Persepolis — Marjane Satrapi’s searing, stylish memoir of growing up in Iran through revolution, repression, and rebellion, newly restored by Odyssey Classics. They also take on Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, a spy thriller that trades action for dry wit and quiet unease. An episode about animation as autobiography, genre as pleasure, and the specific delight of a Soderbergh film that knows exactly what it wants to be.

Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour returns to cinemas — a quiet revolution in filmmaking that blends love, loss, and the long shadow of human destruction. Hosts Kiriko Mechanicus and Elliot Bloom unpack why this haunting classic still matters today. Why did Resnais turn to fiction after his devastating Holocaust documentary Night and Fog? And what does the film reveal about the limits of representation — what cinema can and cannot show of the catastrophic — that makes it as urgent now as it was in 1959?

Did audiences jump the gun on Alex Garland’s Warfare? Before its release, the brutally realist portrait of America’s war in Iraq was deemed just another army recruitment movie — but Hugo Emmerzael and Laura Gommans definitely don’t see it that way. Also: Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl gives Pamela Anderson a tender, neon-lit comeback, but did it warrant the awards hype? Plus a conversation that cuts to the heart of what separates a genuinely anti-war film from one that merely depicts war.

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.

Dutch Nazi propagandist Jan Teunissen was once one of the most powerful — and now largely forgotten — figures in Dutch cinema. In De Propagandist, director Luuk Bouwman unearths Teunissen’s unsettling legacy: a filmmaker who aligned his artistic ambitions with the Nazi occupation. In conversation with Kiriko, Bouwman reflects on the ethics of examining a collaborator’s work, and what Dutch cinema’s suppressed history of wartime propaganda reveals about the relationship between art, power, and moral compromise.