Episodes

Hailed as the Citizen Kane of bad movies, The Room has transcended its origins as Tommy Wiseau’s enigmatic vanity project to become a bona fide cult phenomenon. But how did it achieve such status — and what, beneath its layers of unintentional surrealism, is it really about? Hosts Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms unravel the film’s bizarre legacy, offering an essential guide to its chaotic production and the question of whether something made without self-awareness can still be, in some profound sense, art.

When Parasite won Best Picture, it put Korean cinema in the global spotlight — but it was the result of decades of bold filmmaking. With Mickey 17 now in cinemas, Laura Gommans and Kiriko Mechanicus explore the bloody brilliance of the Korean New Wave: a cinema shaped by the country’s turbulent history, uncensored and unafraid. They examine Korea’s obsession with vengeance as a structural principle, and why this cinema speaks so powerfully to global audiences who may know nothing about its specific political context.

Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael are at odds over Mickey 17 — Bong Joon-ho’s English-language follow-up to Parasite — which puts them in the position of asking whether a director’s intelligence translates when the production scale changes. They’re in complete agreement about Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, which steals the episode. And Brazilian awards contender I’m Still Here sparks a heated debate about Oscar bait — is it manipulation or a worthy film that simply deserves recognition? A Review Roundup in which disagreement is the point.

Oz Perkins has become horror cinema’s most interesting director — and The Monkey, his latest, leaves Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael with a productive ambivalence: is he a filmmaker who can’t land an ending, or is the open ending the whole point? The episode also brings dispatches from Cannes, where Hugo spoke with Jia Zhang-ke about Caught by the Tides — a film Hugo finds transcendental and Laura suspects might be slightly too pleased with itself. A Review Roundup in which the conversation is the discovery.

With a new wave of nostalgia-driven musical biopics — A Complete Unknown, Better Man, Maria — flooding theatres, hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael ask what it actually takes to make a great one. A genre weighed down by its own well-worn narrative bingo card, the musical biopic too often settles for a greatest-hits retelling rather than embracing the strangeness of the artist at its centre. An episode about why the form keeps failing its subjects — and what the rare exceptions do differently.

The first Review Roundup: Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom on The Brutalist — Brady Corbet’s Academy Award-nominated epic — and whether the AI controversy surrounding its post-production changes anything about the film’s achievement. The episode also considers Pablo Larrain’s Maria, which attempts an MCU-style crossover of prestige biopics to mixed results, and revisits Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour — back in cinemas and as provocative and hypnotic as it was on first release. Three films, one consistent question: what do we watch for?

Legendary filmmaker Ernest Dickerson joins Elliot Bloom for a journey through one of the great careers in American cinema. From his early love of science fiction and a chance meeting with Spike Lee on his first day of film school, Dickerson reflects on the films that defined a generation: Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Juice. With encyclopaedic knowledge and genuine passion, he traces the development of a visual language that captured Black American life with a specificity and urgency that mainstream Hollywood had never managed.

Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu returns the vampire to its original horror — but why does the vampire keep returning at all? Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms trace the creature from Murnau to Twilight, from Universal monsters to Hammer Horror to the elegant melancholy of Let the Right One In. What do our vampire films say about sexuality, class, immigration, and the fear of the body that refuses to stay dead? An episode that takes genre seriously as a form of cultural self-examination, and finds the vampire more revealing than it has any right to be.

Fresh from winning the Dutch Film Critics’ Choice Award at the Netherlands Film Festival, LAB111 resident filmmaker Jeroen Houben joins Kiriko to discuss Torch Song — a film about an eccentric former pop singer who arrives in her estranged half-brother’s life and proceeds to unravel it beautifully. Houben describes his desire to make a film that neither sentimentalises the struggling artist nor pathologises her, and his conviction that offbeat comedy can carry more emotional weight than drama that announces its intentions in advance.

Raoul Peck — director of I Am Not Your Negro — has spent his career excavating the history that official archives prefer to leave buried. His documentary on Ernest Cole, South Africa’s first apartheid-era photographer whose life ended in mysterious exile, is both intimate and structurally bold: a meditation on what images cost to make and what happens to the person who makes them. Speaking with Elliot, Peck draws connections between apartheid South Africa, contemporary systems of segregation, and the ongoing question of whether documentary cinema can do justice to lives lived under state violence.