Tom Ooms

Tom Ooms is the Head of Cinema at LAB111, Amsterdam’s cult cinema in a former pathology lab on the south side of the river. He is also the owner of Odyssey Classic, keeper of the LAB111 archive, and one of the two hosts on Celebrating Cinema for whom film programming is a daily job rather than a hobby with a podcast attached.

The pathology-lab thing is real. The building was a teaching theatre until the 1990s, before it became a cinema, and the architecture still does the seating gradient the original purpose required. Tom programmes the room as if the architecture was a brief — the films that work in LAB111 are usually the ones that benefit from being watched in a room designed for close looking.

On Celebrating Cinema, Tom brings the historical and curatorial frame. When the show argues about a director’s place in the canon, Tom is the host most likely to ask whether the canon is being built by the right institutions. When the show argues about a recent release, he is the host most likely to know which 1970s film it is unwittingly remaking.

His lane is repertory cinema and the politics of programming: which films get a second screening, which films get forgotten, which festival circuits are doing the work of keeping difficult cinema in circulation, and which are recycling consensus. He runs the episodes on programming history, the LAB111 archive, and any episode where the question is where do we put this film once the noise around it dies down.

He rotates through the show’s Hot Take column once every five weeks, and writes the weekly Lead in the Celebrating Cinema Substack on episodes he anchors.

If you are new to the show, the LAB111-archive episode on [TBD: pick a strong Tom episode] is the standard recommendation.