Celebrating Cinema

Is this the year of the Skarsgårds? Hosts Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom kick things off with Pillion, Alexander Skarsgård's domcom about a BDSM relationship that keeps flipping the script on who's actually holding the power. Funnier and sharper than you'd expect, and a lot more honest about relationships.
Then brother Bill Skarsgård shows up in Gus Van Sant's Dead Man's Wire, an offbeat thriller based a true-life hostage-taker, Tony Kiritsis, wanting to get back what he was owed. Laura and Elliot discuss the possible message behind Van Sant making this film, right now, in a world where Luigi Mangione fan edits are trending.
And Laura and her folk-drenched past is eager to chat about History of Sound. A tender, quietly devastating homage from Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor to American folk music that's barely registering on anyone's radar.
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When the White House posts a montage of Hollywood blockbusters cut against US drone strikes on Iran, it raises a question Italian cinema has spent seventy years wrestling with: can cinema ever truly resist power — or does it always end up serving it?
In this episode, hosts Hugo Emmerzael and Elliot Bloom take Bernardo Bertolucci's newly restored masterpiece Il Conformista (1970) as their guide. Moving through Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, they trace how a generation of Italian filmmakers tried to dismantle the seduction of fascism by inhabiting its aesthetics — and ask what that tradition tells us about cinema's role in manufacturing national myths in 2026.
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Films discussed: Il Conformista (1970), The Night Porter (1974), Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

From the alien drifter of The Man Who Fell to Earth to the unforgettable Goblin King of Labyrinth, David Bowie built one of the strangest and most fascinating film careers in pop history.
In this episode, hosts Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms dive into David Bowie’s acting career, exploring how the musician moved through cinema across four decades. They chat about what drew Bowie to the silver screen, why acting became one of his favourite side quests, and the performances that defined his screen presence.
From playing Andy Warhol in Basquiat to a perfectly deadpan cameo in Zoolander, they discuss why directors kept casting Bowie, what made him so magnetically strange on camera, and which roles remain the most unforgettable—before tackling the impossible question: who could ever play Bowie in a biopic?
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Films Mentioned:
The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)
Christiane F. (Uli Edel, 1981)
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (Nagisa Oshima, 1983)
The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983)
Labyrinth (Jim Henson, 1986)
The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch, 1992)
Basquiat (Julian Schnabel, 1996)
Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001)
Moonage Daydream (Brett Morgen, 2022)

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at nineteen. Cinema has been retelling it ever since - and mainly getting it wrong.
Hosts Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms dig into the big question: is Frankenstein the story of a misunderstood outcast, an abandoned child who never asked to exist, or a cautionary tale about scientists who should really know better? More importantly, why is Frankenstein always so ugly?
They trace the monster on screen through James Whale's Universal original in 1931, Hammer Horror's gloriously excessive franchise — essentially the Marvel Universe before Marvel existed — and into modern Frankenstein-by-another-name films like Ex Machina and Blade Runner. Plus reviews of the two new adaptations, Frankenstein and The Bride, putting the myth back in the spotlight.
Also: Laura confesses to having seen Fifty Shades Darker in the cinema three times and to watching Arrival at the gym. This is relevant. Kind of.
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Listen back to The Immortal Cinema of Bloodsuckers And Nightstalkers
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At this year's Berlinale Film Festival, Wim Wenders declared that cinema is not political — so hosts Elliot Bloom and Kiriko Mechanicus, both speaking from their own diasporic experiences, decided to put that to the test. Moving through Persepolis, Incendies, Bend It Like Beckham, Girlhood, and Chantal Akerman's News from Home, they explore how diaspora cinema transforms the politics of borders and belonging into something deeply, unavoidably human. Because for anyone who has ever lived between cultures, cinema isn't just art — it's a second home.
This episode is part of Diaspora Diaries, LAB111's curated season running January through March exploring stories of movement, identity, and belonging on the big screen.
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