Laura Gommans

Laura Gommans is a film journalist. She lives in Amsterdam, hosts Celebrating Cinema with Hugo, Kiriko and Tom, and does most of her film writing on social — her TikTok and Instagram are where a lot of cinephiles in the Dutch-and-English crossover first found her.

The interview work is the more public end of it. Laura has talked at length with Anne Hathaway, Danny Boyle, Alex Garland, and a few dozen others, and produced and moderated film content for Netflix, Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. The job, when she does it well — which is most of the time — is to ask the third question, not the first two.

On the podcast she runs the rankings episodes and writes most of the cold-open essays. The register is the join between access journalism and personal criticism: she comes back from a junket with a structural read on the film and a sharper one on the press cycle, and what surfaces in the recording is usually the question the press cycle was avoiding. The most-listened-to episode of Celebrating Cinema is one Laura anchors.

What she brings to the room, more than anyone else on the show, is the ability to name what an argument is actually about once it has been going in circles for fifteen minutes.

Her Letterboxd (linked above) runs at the pace of a working critic — terse, accurate, occasionally devastating, often funnier than the reviews she gets paid for. She also writes the weekly Lead in the Celebrating Cinema Substack on episodes she anchors, and rotates through the Hot Take column once every five weeks.

If you are new to the show, the rankings episode on [TBD: gateway recommendation] is the standard recommendation. The cold-open essay she wrote on [TBD] is a good second.