Celebrating Cinema

With social media hype swirling around Marty Supreme and Wuthering Heights, hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael unpack the marketing machinery behind both releases—and whether the films can live up to the discourse they’ve generated.
Hugo questions whether the outrage over Emerald Fennell’s reimagining of Heathcliff is worth our energy, suggesting we might be better off taking the film at face value instead of getting caught up in manufactured controversy. Meanwhile, Laura traces the evolution of movie marketin, from the event-cinema spectacle of Jaws and Jurassic Park to the viral mythmaking of The Blair Witch Project, into today’s algorithm-driven campaigns built on shock, virality, and off-screen narratives.
Together they discuss how in an era of social media spectacle, are studios selling us the film—or the conversation around it?
Get tickets to Marty Supreme @ LAB111
Get tickets to Wuthering Heights @ LAB111

Host Laura Gommans chats with cultural critic Esje Seigfried about the lasting impact of Brokeback Mountain 20 years on, and how queer cinema has expanded since. They dig into the genre’s history of tragedy and grief—and ask: can queer stories also be fun, messy and steamy, like Heated Rivalry and Heartstopper? From the melancholia of Happy Together to the risks queer filmmakers take today, they explore the queer stories we want to see more of, and whether it really matters if a straight actor plays a queer role.
Get tickets to Brokeback Mountain @ LAB111
Get tickets to Happy Together @ LAB111

In this episode, Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael dive into what might be Park Chan-wook’s masterpiece, No Other Choice, breaking down how it tackles capitalism and the fragile middle-class experience in ways that feel all too real.
They also chat about the recent Oscar nominations and the 45th anniversary of Kubrick’s The Shining—exploring why the true horror of this classic, how it clashed with Stephen King’s vision, and why Kubrick would have loved TikTok film debates.
Get tickets to No Other Choice
Get tickets to The Shining
Get tickets to Film Lecture: How To Build A Haunted Hotel?
Get tickets to Drink-Along: The Fall
Get tickets to Brazil Beneath The Surface

The death of French cinema icon Brigitte Bardot has reignited a familiar and uncomfortable question: can we separate art from the artist? Long celebrated as a screen legend, Bardot’s legacy is also inseparable from her openly expressed far-right views—forcing a renewed reckoning with how we engage with culturally significant work made by morally compromised figures.
In this episode of Celebrating Cinema, hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael reflect on their own responsibilities as viewers and critics. They discuss whether watching films by “bad people” can still offer insight into the art and the person behind it, and whether cinema can act as a space to confront difficult ideas rather than retreat from them.
If the work already exists, what does critical engagement look like—and do we watch films for their politics, their artistry, or something more complicated?
Get tickets to Le Mépris @ LAB111
Get tickets to Diaspora Diarires @ LAB111
Get tickets to Straight to Video: Brain Damage @ LAB111

Hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael explore Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet (yes, a movie about Shakespeare and his family), alongside a range of movies that are, in one way or another, really just adaptations of Shakespeare's plays.

Laura and Hugo also discuss Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a film that may have slipped under the radar this awards season, though Ethan Hawke’s magnetic performance is not to be missed, as well as the endearing documentary Tale of Sylian.

Get tickets to Hamnet @ LAB111
Get tickets to Diaspora Diarires @ LAB111
Get tickets to Fight The Power: Goodbye Julia @ LAB111