Celebrating Cinema

Do ratings help us discover great films or have they quietly changed the way we watch?
Before you've even bought a ticket, you probably know the Letterboxd average, the IMDb score or the Rotten Tomatoes percentage. Somewhere between the opening scene and the closing credits, many of us are already deciding on a number of our own.
Laura Gommans is joined by producer Elliot Bloom to discuss what ratings have done to film culture. From an IMDb Top 250 that barely changes to Rotten Tomatoes' aggregate scores, they explore how audience opinion shapes everything from blockbuster filmmaking to the rise of safe, audience-tested stars, and why the best films rarely fit neatly into a number.

Get tickets to ⁠Girly Pop! But I'm A Cheerleader⁠ @ LAB111
Get tickets to ⁠Schmutz Cinema: Close-Up On Late⁠x @ LAB111

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

The Watermelon Woman (1996) was Cheryl Dunye's debut and the first American feature directed by a Black lesbian. A film that slips between video-store romance and a forged archive, asking who gets recorded by cinema and who gets written out of it. Thirty years on, it has been restored, added to the Criterion Collection, and, for the very first time, released in Dutch cinemas.
Filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus is joined by Justine Knijn, distributor at Eye Filmmuseum and the person bringing the film to the Netherlands. They get into the film's faked documentary structure and its late reveal; the 1996 sex scene that drew conservative backlash over its tiny public budget; and the satire of academia.
A conversation about lesbian film history, restoration, and the long afterlife of films the industry tried to forget and a case for a mainstream gay summer.
Get tickets to ⁠⁠The Watermelon Woman @ LAB111
Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: No Country For Old Men @ LAB111
Get tickets to ⁠⁠Fight The Power: Palestine 36 @ LAB111
Get tickets to Girly Pop! But I'm A Cheerleader @ LAB111
Get tickets to Schmutz Cinema: Close-Up On Latex @ LAB111

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

Nobody has ever filmed a real alien, so why do they all look the same? The grey skin, the black almond eyes, sixty years running.
This week Laura Gommans is joined by historian Alexander Bartels, who curated LAB111's We Are Not Alone season, for a conversation about the gap between the aliens cinema gives us and the things people actually report seeing. On screen: greys, flying saucers, humanoid visitors. From the real records that Bartels studies: declassified military footage, radar data, government files from around the world there are mostly orbs and lights, unspectacular and almost impossible to film. So where did the grey come from? They follow the loop back to one telling case: The Bellero Shield, an episode of The Outer Limits that aired in February 1964, twelve days before Barney Hill, under hypnosis, drew the wrap-around-eyed alien that matched it almost exactly.
Screen and sighting have been copying each other ever since, right up to a 2024 Pentagon report that blames film and television for what people believe they've seen. Has cinema ever shown us something genuinely other, or only ever redrawn ourselves?

Get tickets to ⁠Disclosure Day⁠ @ LAB111
Get tickets to ⁠We Are Not Alone⁠ @ LAB111

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

Steven Spielberg spent fifty years teaching us to look up. When the Pentagon released its real alien files, nobody blinked. His new film Disclosure Day marks the day the truth finally lands — this time his aliens look back at us, but the question is whether anyone still believes him.
Fresh from the Tuschinski premiere, Laura Gommans and producer Elliot Bloom get into late Spielberg — shortcuts, or message over quality — empathy as the ruling emotion of the universe, and whether cinema's great sentimentalist can still earn the tears. One of them cried twice. The other counted seventy FBI agents with no peripheral vision.
With a voice note from BBC film critic Ali Plumb on the night Spielberg crashed his pub quiz, and a listener's hot take on thirty wet years of Spielberg's cinematographer Janusz Kamiński.
Spoilers from 18:06 — come back when you've seen it.

Get tickets to Disclosure Day @ LAB111
Get tickets to We Are Not Alone @ LAB111

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

The Fast and the Furious (Rob Cohen, 2001) was a small film about Los Angeles street racers, immigrant car culture, and a cop who didn't want to be one. Twenty-five years on it's a seven-billion-dollar franchise where cars get launched into space and "family" is a marketing strategy. From Echo Park to outer space — what does that arc tell us about Hollywood?
This is the first part of Cine of the Times, a new monthly Celebrating Cinema strand. Each month, critic Hugo Emmerzael (Filmkrant, Locarno) and media studies scholar Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University) take one film from the century so far, ranging from arthouse to spectacular pulp. This month: the serialised blockbuster, the economics of the sequel, and how a street-racing B-movie became the template for the modern studio franchise.
Listen first. Then join us at LAB111 on Wednesday 17 June — curated clips, an extended introduction, and a post-screening discussion. Get your tickets here.
A film podcast from LAB111 — Amsterdam's arthouse cinema for independent and cult films. Produced by Elliot Bloom.