Celebrating Cinema

Hollywood loves a remake. But why take a film that already works and make it all over again? Host Laura Gommans sits down with LAB111’s Head of Cinema, Tom Ooms, to dig into Hollywood’s habit of reworking films from around the world and what happens when it gets its hands on someone else’s story.
From Masayuki Suô’s Shall We Dance? and its Richard Gere-starring remake to Funny Games, The Vanishing and Force Majeure, they look at the changes that can turn a film into something completely different. There are American happy endings, cultural misunderstandings and the occasional remake that becomes a classic in its own right, as with Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, adapted from Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs.
With Odyssey Classics re-releasing the original Japanese Shall We Dance?, it’s a good moment to consider Hollywood’s never-ending impulse to remake the world in its own image.

Get tickets to Shall We Dance? @ LAB111
Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: Under The Skin @ LAB111

A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

What can cinema really fix? In The Beloved, Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen (The Beasts, Mother) explores the complicated relationship between a powerful film director and his estranged daughter, using the filmmaking process itself to examine questions of identity, domination and abandonment.
In conversation with film critic Hugo Emmerzael, Sorogoyen discusses turning the camera on cinema itself, experimenting with different visual languages, and creating a film within a film inspired by the work of Terrence Malick. He also reflects on his recurring interest in toxic masculinity, his collaboration with screenwriter Isabel Peña, and the personal experiences of fatherhood, loss and family history that shaped The Beloved.
Can art repair what life has broken? For Sorogoyen, cinema might not fix everything, but it can help us understand ourselves, and each other, a little better.

Get tickets to The Beloved @ LAB111

A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

In 2007, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story tore the music biopic apart so thoroughly that Hollywood should never have been able to make one with a straight face again. It flopped. Since then, we’ve had Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Elvis and, this year, Michael. So what went wrong?
For the latest Cine of the Times, film critic Hugo Emmerzael and media scholar Dan Hassler-Forest revisit Jake Kasdan’s merciless parody to figure out why the music biopic refuses to die. They get into how much of the supposedly "true" story never actually happened, the difference between inhabiting a star and simply imitating one, and John C. Reilly’s commitment to playing every absurd cliché completely straight. They also ask what happens when the music industry turns its back catalogue into algorithm-friendly jukebox movies.
Recorded again online after the producer lost the first take.

Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story @ LAB111.
Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: Under the Skin @ LAB111.

A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

For forty years, Tom Cruise has sold us one thing: a man who will not stop running. In Digger (2026), Alejandro G. Iñárritu casts him as an oil tycoon in prosthetics, only for the trailer to remind us of every Tom Cruise who came before. What happens when the ultimate movie star tries to disappear into a role?
Laura Gommans and producer Elliot Bloom take Digger as a starting point to ask whether a movie star can ever truly play against type, or whether the persona is always visible beneath the performance. From Henry Fonda turning killer in Once Upon a Time in the West to Adam Sandler unravelling in Punch-Drunk Love, they explore why some of the most revealing performances happen when actors push against the image we already have of them. And what happens when Jesse Plemons walks into Digger and threatens to steal the show?
A follow-up to our earlier episode asking whether Tom Cruise could save cinema. The first half is spoiler-free. The alarm sounds at 18:01.
Tell us how you'd rate it. We can't decide.

Get tickets to Digger @ LAB111
Get tickets to Shall We Dance? (Ballroom Dancing Workshop) @ LAB111
Get tickets to Film and Food: Do The Right Thing @ LAB111

A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

From Paul Verhoeven to Hoyte van Hoytema to Halina Reijn, Dutch filmmakers have made a mark far beyond the Netherlands. But why doesn’t Dutch cinema travel as far as the talent it produces?

For this Nederlands Film Festival special, Celebrating Cinema host Elliot Bloom speaks with actor Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing, director Mees Peijnenburg and producer Leontine Petit, who co-produced the Oscar-nominated Brazilian film The Secret Agent.

Together, they discuss what Dutch cinema gains from international collaboration, why homegrown films struggle to find audiences, and the tension between making films for the Dutch market and competing internationally. What would it take to build a Dutch cinema that can connect at home and travel abroad?