Celebrating Cinema

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?

For this Nederlands Film Festival special, Kiriko Mechanicus meets two rising Dutch filmmakers who use cinema to get closer to people and histories — and to find out what lies beyond what they already know.
Amanda van Hesteren's Dagen met Blue is built around the trust between filmmaker and subject. Kiriko chats to Amanda about her fascination with people in all their colours, how she creates the space for Blue to open up, and what she can learn about someone by spending enough time with them to look beyond the version of themselves they show the world.
In Bagasi – wat we meedragen, Emma Lesuis investigates her family's colonial history in Suriname. By combining documentary and theatre, Emma finds a way into a history that runs through both the colonised and the coloniser in her own family and, in the process, comes to see that history differently.
Sometimes, you have to make the film to understand what you're actually looking at.

Watch Dagen Met Blue @ NFF
Watch Bagasi on NPO

How did 9/11 change Hollywood and when does entertainment become propaganda?
Marking 25 years since 9/11 and coinciding with LAB111’s Manufacturing Consent programme, Elliot Bloom and film critic Hugo Emmerzael trace cinema’s long relationship with propaganda and political power. From revolutionary montage and The Battle of Algiers to Black Hawk Down, Zero Dark Thirty and Iron Man, they look at how wars are sold, enemies invented and ideology turned into entertainment.
At the centre of the conversation is the profound shift in American cinema after 9/11, when the War on Terror became embedded in Hollywood storytelling and spectacle. Elliot and Hugo unpack why propaganda rarely announces itself as propaganda, and how the films we watch can shape whose stories we believe, whose violence we accept and who gets cast as the enemy.
Get tickets to Manufacturing Consent @ LAB111
Get tickets to Film Lecture: Cinematic Ghosts of 9/11 @ LAB111
Get tickets to Akira @ LAB111
Get tickets to Film & Food series @ LAB111

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

Thirty-five years after Terminator 2: Judgment Day, cinema is still imagining the end of the world through killer machines, nuclear war, viruses and alien invasions. But did one of the greatest blockbusters ever made teach us to imagine the apocalypse all wrong?
With Terminator 2 returning to our screens in 4K, producer Elliot Bloom and filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus ask why cinema is so obsessed with watching the world end and why Hollywood tends to make collapse so spectacular. Through Children of Men, Idiocracy and Brazil, they look beyond the big cinematic apocalypse to the dystopias where life simply carries on.
From our need to give the things we fear a human face to our strange enjoyment of watching everything fall apart, the conversation explores what these imagined futures reveal about the world we already live in. And whether dystopian cinema, rather than simply indulging our worst fears, might give us a way of imagining something different.
Get tickets to Terminator 2: Judgement Day @ LAB111
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Get tickets to The Big Lebowski @ LAB111