Celebrating Cinema

Cinema's dirtiest little secret is that it's designed to make you want something you can never have.
In this episode of Celebrating Cinema, host Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms — LAB111's Head of Cinema — talk about what cinema's fixations have done to them. Laura learned to write in Elvish because of The Lord of the Rings. Tom is still working out how much of his idea of relationships comes from Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). We have all spent more time thinking about actors and characters we will never meet than is probably reasonable. Parasocial attachment used to be the strange edge of fandom. Now it's the default condition of watching.
The conversation moves through 60 years of films about obsession — Vertigo, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), and what they made possible: Misery, Perfect Blue, La Pianiste, Whiplash, Babygirl — but the question underneath is the one cinema doesn't like to answer. What does this kind of looking do to the people being looked at? The actor engineered into someone else's ideal. The face that turns into a brand. And whether cinema knows what it's done to us, or is still pretending it doesn't.

A film podcast from LAB111 — Amsterdam's arthouse cinema for independent and cult films. Programmed alongside the Can't Get You Out Of My Head season. Produced by Elliot Bloom. Tickets at lab111.nl/obsession.

Amadeus (1984, Miloš Forman) is not really about Mozart. It's a film about the rest of us — the ones who can recognise genius but will never possess it. Salieri is the true protagonist of this musical biopic. His tragedy isn't jealousy, it's clarity.
Now back in cinemas in a new 4K restoration, Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms get into mediocrity, and what it means to be desperate to be a genius and know, quietly, that you won't be. Whether musical genius is even something we value anymore. And if TikTok — full of AI Slop, or a thousand strangers going viral for no particular reason — is the logical conclusion of a culture that stopped caring.
For everyone currently in their Salieri era.
Get tickets to Amadeus @ LAB111
Get tickets to Film Lecture: My Film Is Vietnam @ LAB111
Get tickets to Can't Get You Out of My Head: Films of Obsession @ LAB111
Get tickets to Fight The Power: How To Catch A Butterfly @ LAB111

Miranda once told Andy she was the greatest disappointment of her career. Twenty years on, the question isn't whether she was right — it's what Andy did with it.
Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom chat about The Devil Wears Prada and the new sequel and what they have to say about ambition, high fashion, and the specific cruelty of wanting things that cost more than you can reasonably pay. We discuss the consequences for Miranda who is now no longer untouchable — threatened by corporate money that sees a fashion magazine and thinks: overhead. Her methods belong to another era. So does her certainty.
Both films ask what we owe the people who pushed us, even when the pushing was cruel. Whether Miranda is a feminist icon or a toxic boss may matter less than what she made possible.
Plus a hot take from one of our listeners on whether screenwriters get enough credit for the worlds they create.
Get tickets to The Devil Wears Prada 2 @ LAB111
Get tickets to Girls in Film Presents: Behind The Scenes of Motherhood @ LAB111

The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, USA, 2006). The Devil Wears Prada 2 (USA, 2025).

Can a film be more intimate than pornography?
Can a film be more intimate than pornography? In Truly Naked (2026), BAFTA-nominated writer-director Muriel D'Ansembourg tells the story of Alec — a teenager raised by two parents in the adult industry, who's seen everything about sex except real intimacy. A school project on porn addiction, and a feminist classmate, force him to confront how his generation actually encounters sex.
Laura Gommans sits down with Muriel to ask what cinema still knows about intimacy that the erotic industry has given up on: close-ups, the gaze, the longing for touch. And whether a film that stages intimacy so precisely is any less manipulative than pornography.
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Listen back to Where Has All The Sex In Cinema Gone.

A note from us: we spent the past two weeks going through your survey responses — thank you to everyone who filled it in. Winners will be contacted this week. We're working on what comes next, but we didn't want to leave you hanging.
Last year it was A Complete Unknown, Better Man, Maria, this year it's now Michael Jackson. The musical biopic is back again, with all its cliches.
We recorded this conversation when A Complete Unknown hit cinemas. Hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael ask what it takes to make a great musical biopic — a genre too often content with greatest-hits storytelling: the origin-story childhood, the long climb, the fall, the redemption arc that arrives whether the life earned one or not. Cinema can do stranger, more honest things with a life. Why doesn't it?
We revisit the films that actually break the formula, ask why audiences keep returning to the glossy reenactment, and consider what the genre would look like if it stopped playing it safe.
With MJ arriving this month, it felt like the right moment to bring this one back.