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PODCAST

Seventh Row Podcast

A weekly film podcast that helps you have a more rewarding experience watching movies by connecting you to the best under-the-radar films from around the world so that you don"t have to watch all the movies to watch good movies that expand your cinematic horizons — both in content and form. This is a podcast about those films, the joys and challenges of finding and watching those films, how filmmaking choices affect our experience of them, and the people and places we discover through looking

tv & film film reviews

All Episodes

30:57

194. Tender Loving Care: Mike Leigh's wonderful film...

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2026/10/01

Mike Leigh's Tender Loving Care is a film about kind and empathetic people being kind and empathetic. And how rare is that? In this episode, Alex Heeney asks what tender loving care actually looks like in the film — between friends, family members, and social workers and the people they care for — and what that care can and can't do. Alex digs into the scenes and filmmaking choices that illuminate those relationships, including the film's use of domestic spaces, what Leigh keeps offscreen,

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14:12

193. TIFF: Why Stuffed, the taxidermy romance...

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2026/09/14

What happens when a lonely taxidermist looking for her first human subject meets a lonely man willing to volunteer for the job? Apparently, you get a musical romance. In this episode, I'm talking about Theo Rhys's Stuffed, starring Jodie Comer as taxidermist Araminta and Harry Melling as Bernie, which had its world premiere at TIFF. The songs themselves may not be particularly memorable, but Stuffed does something I'm always hoping a movie musical will do: it actually has a reason to be a musical. I

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01:08:06

192. At the Place of Ghosts with director Bretten Hannam

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2026/06/20

Some critics have approached At the Place of Ghosts as either a horror movie or a psychological drama and found it wanting on those terms. But what if that's the wrong question? What if the more interesting question is what the film's horror elements allow it to do? In this episode, Alex Heeney explores how writer-director Bretten Hannam uses ghosts, hauntings, and a forest where memories persist to connect personal trauma to larger histories—and to imagine healing through relationships with family,

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13:17

191. Great TV asks for more than a binge

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2026/06/18

Why do some shows keep rewarding us years later? And is there a way to make those rewards come sooner — without having to get older or rewatch ad infinitum? In this episode, Alex introduces The Long Arc, a new 10-week experience built around the first season of HBO's Looking. She walks through what a typical week looks like, how the live sessions work, why each participant follows a different thread through the season, and how spending time with the same show—and the same group of people—changes the

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12:59

190. Oslo, August 31st: Beginning and Ending (Deep...

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2026/04/02

Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31st starts with a sequence that doesn't advance the plot — and yet shifts how you watch the entire film — and ends with a sequence with almost no dialogue but a lot happens. They're sequences I've returned to again and again over 14 years to figure out how they work — and keep discovering something new that shifts how I see the film. In this episode, Joachim Trier talks about the problem the opening was trying to solve, Eskil Vogt talks about the challenges of writing

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39:49

189. Berlinale: a Sámi musical, a queer Black South...

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2026/03/17

Some of the best, most boundary-pushing cinema at the Berlinale is quietly tucked away in the sidebars where most of the press never look. In today's episode, I'm looking at three films that feel like a step forward for women's stories: Arrú: A Sámi musical from Norway Black Burns Fast: A queer South African coming-of-age story directed by a Black woman The Education of Jane Cumming: A Scottish period drama based on the first documented legal case involving accusations of lesbians in the UK Taken

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13:08

188. My Berlinale talk: Why the first conversation...

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2026/02/17

This episode was originally recorded for a panel at the Berlinale Film Festival called Let's talk about (short) films! Pluralistic Discourse in Film Criticism. I was invited to speak about the online film programs I've been building for thinking and talking about film — where we don't just share opinions about a film and move on. Instead, we're looking for something new: what does this film offer that I didn't notice the first time? Because you don't need to wait for a major life change to see a

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56:17

187. Sound of Falling + Interview with Mascha Schilinski

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2026/01/26

Sound of Falling, the second feature by German writer-director Mascha Schilinski, follows women across four generations of the same farming family. Gothic and ambitious, it explores memory, intergenrational trauma, and what it's like to live inside a woman's body — while still showing moments of joy and connection. Through its form, the film offers the audience a catharsis that the characters don't have access to. So on today's episode, host Alex Heeney digs into why the film won her over…and then

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39:26

186. Heated Rivalry: the queer Canadian hockey...

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2026/01/06

The best directed TV show of 2025 is a queer hockey romance from Canada called Heated Rivalry. And like the rest of the internet, host Alex Heeney has become quite a fan. But she's been thinking a lot about what makes it good and what has made it popular, and how those two things definitely intersect, but the Venn diagram isn't just a circle. So on today's episode, Alex talks about why she, too, was very excited for the cottage, why the show is hitting in this cultural moment, what still felt

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01:28:17

185. Chloé Zhao's Hamnet with Angelo Muredda

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2025/12/12

Early screenings of Chloé Zhao's Hamnet had critics weeping in the aisles Host Alex Heeney left it dry-eyed — and so did her guest, Angelo Muredda. We're Shakespeare fans, long-time film critics, and not exactly immune to a good cry — so in this episode, we try to figure out why the film didn't land. We dig into what works in the film (a short list) and what doesn't (a longer one), where the adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's novel went awry, and whether having read a synopsis of Hamlet on Wikipedia

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02:18

Happening Tuesday (Oct 28): join me live for a queer...

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2025/10/27

This Tuesday, October 28, I'm hosting The Short Take — a free, one-time-only live workshop for film lovers who want to watch and think together. We'll watch an award-winning 22-minute short from 2017 that looks at queer history — and who gets to tell it. It's a film I haven't stopped thinking about in the last 8 years. Then, we'll rewatch key scenes and unpack how the film's form (e.g. blocking, shot choice, editing, production design, and more) shapes what it makes us feel. 🗓️ When: Tuesday, Oct

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17:33

184. What Happens When You Apply ‘Yes, And’ to Film...

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2025/10/20

What if the most powerful insights about a film don’t come from watching it alone — but from talking it through with curious people who notice what you missed, and help you turn half-formed thoughts into something deeper? In this episode, I share why I built The Long Take — A space for deep, layered, perspective-shifting conversations about film — and how a spirit of collaboration, attention, and trust can transform how we see movies…and ourselves We kick off Nov 2 with a zero-prep welcome session

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18:14

183. The Choral (TIFF 2025) with Ralph Fiennes: When...

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2025/09/18

How can a film with a queer protagonist, written by a queer playwright, and directed by a queer man… not be a queer film? That’s the tricky question I'm tackling with The Choral, the WWI period drama that just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). In this episode: my Ralph Fiennes/Nicholas Hytner fangirling, why the film works as a crowd-pleaser but flattens queerness and other marginalized identities, and the bigger questions it raises about reclaiming — or sanitizing — queer

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32:41

182. Couture (with Angelina Jolie) and Alice...

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2025/09/15

Alice Winocour's Couture is a backstage film about the fashion world — less about the clothes than the bodies who wear them, shape them, and photograph them. It's a film about the ways that commerce and fashion (and medicine) shape and damage women's bodies. As a Winocour fan and researcher since 2015, Alex Heeney connects Couture to Winocour's explorations of traumatized bodies, outsiders, and backstage stories throughout her body of work. 🎟 If you want to explore a film together in conversation

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25:59

181. Between Dreams and Hope and queer survival (TIFF...

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2025/09/08

At TIFF, Alex dives into Iranian filmmaker Farnoosh Samadi's Between Dreams and Hope, a powerful film about a trans man in Iran navigating the dehumanizing maze of gender-affirming care — and connects it to two others, from Canada and France, that reveal how patriarchy, money, and bureaucracy shape queer and trans survival. These aren’t straight reviews so much as reflections on how films spark curiosity, uncover hidden systems, and resist erasure. ✨ Don’t miss it! This October, join me for Living

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36:16

180. Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value (TIFF 2025)

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2025/09/07

Joachim Trier’s new film, Sentimental Value, is already a buzzy hit. Alex Heeney has been thinking and writing about Trier’s films for more than a decade, and this one sharpened her sense of what she values in his work. In this episode out of TIFF, she look at the film's portrait of a complicated family, the way it reframes familiar Trier themes, and how it speaks to his other films. ✨ This fall I’m hosting an exclusive live event where we’ll unpack Trier’s work together — the kind of deep-dive

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27:09

179. What if we told stories about women beyond their...

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2025/07/18

What happens when a story that once felt modern… suddenly doesn’t? And what does that tell us about the limits — and possibilities — of the stories we tell about women? In this solo episode, Seventh Row Editor-in-Chief Alex Heeney tracks a shift in perspective — hers, and maybe yours too. 📍 How a 2021 film reopened an old question 📍 Why Far from the Madding Crowd (2015) once felt strikingly modern — and what I see in it now 📍 And what this tells us about how our expectations for stories about

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46:13

178. What happened when Hazel trusted my film curation

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2025/07/11

What happens when you watch a film — not just to be entertained — but to reflect, notice, and share? In this episode, Alex Heeney (curator of Reel Ruminators) sits down with Hazel Shaw, a UK member of the community, to uncover what really makes this unique movie-of-the-month space so rewarding — and how it sparks discoveries you might not expect. Together, they talk about: What happens when you watch films that aren't suggested by an algorithm Why gathering with film lovers from around the world

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01:07:27

177. 45 Years (dir. Andrew Haigh) with Lindsay Pugh...

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2025/06/27

Ten years on, 45 Years hasn’t lost an ounce of its emotional weight. In fact, it might just cut deeper. On this episode, host and Seventh Row Editor-in-Chief Alex Heeney is joined by Lindsay Pugh (Woman in Revolt) to revisit Andrew Haigh’s masterpiece about a childless couple celebrating their 45 the wedding anniversary in the same week that a traumatic secret from the past comes to light. We talk about: What makes this story hit differently as we have aged Why the film’s focus on emotional

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43:30

176. Materialists (dir. Celine Song)

Seventh Row Podcast ·

2025/06/20

In this episode, Alex Heeney digs into Celine Song’s Materialists, a film about Lucy, a matchmaker struggling with her own love triangle. Will Lucy (Dakota Johnson) choose love — in the form of her poor ex John (Chris Evans) — or money with eligible bachelor Harry (Pedro Pascal)? And can love and money even co-exist? With its charming cast, elegant blocking, and standout sound design, Materialists could have been a sharp, class-conscious rom-com. But for all its promise, it ends up skimming

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174 results

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