Seventh Row Podcast

A deep dive into Bretten Hannam's At the Place of Ghosts followed by an interview with Hannam. How do you tell a story about two siblings processing a shared childhood trauma when they can't talk about what happened?  In this episode, Alex Heeney explores how  At the Place of Ghosts uses horror elements to make trauma visible, to connect personal memory to larger histories, and to imagine healing...

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 thr...

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 tal...

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...

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...

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'...

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...

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 adapt...

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...

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 ot...

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 b...

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 c...

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 and the role of the family home in telling that story. ✨If you enjoyed the episode, The Deep...

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 mode...

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 wa...

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 ta...

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, Materialist...

Join me (Alex Heeney) on a journey through three films I programmed inside Reel Ruminators — a British political thriller, an Indigenous Canadian documentary, and a queer South African drama — and discover how their contrasts actually illuminate one another.  By the end of this episode, you'll see how exploring differences between films can reshape your own viewing of film as an art form. 🎧 In Th...

Now best known for its stunt-heavy sequels, Mission: Impossible began as a Brian De Palma thriller about surveillance, performance, and how what you see isn't always the whole story. In this episode, we get into: How the opening scene teaches you how to watch the film What makes the writing in this film sing Why the production design is more than just stylish — it's integral to the storytelling Wh...

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is one of the best films of 2025. In this episode, Alex Heeney zooms in on its beginning and ending scenes to show how they set up and pay off the film's emotional arc. From the start, you know you're in a warm, fun place (with a touch of sadness); by the end, you land on a romantic high the film truly earns.  Alex unpacks how choices from structure to song lyrics to bl...

Laura Piani's Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is more than just a great rom-com — it's a funny and moving portrait of grief, writer's block, and a woman learning to move forward. Alex Heeney digs into how Agathe's emotional arc is mirrored in the film's structure, how the frame composition is key to the film's humour and storytelling, and how Piani reimagines Jane Austen archetypes for 2025. 🎁 Want m...

The 2025 Cannes Film Festival kicks off today...and the question on everyone's mind is: what will be the great movies? Mostly, people look to the Cannes Competition (the films that compete for the Palme d'Or) to find the best films. But it's a lesser-known fact that  many amazing films screen in the festival's sidebars. And many of the best films in cinema history have screened in the festival's s...

If you look back on the last year, how many African films have you watched? And how does this compare to the other international films you've seen from other continents? Chances are, you're seeing way more films from  every other continent than from Africa. That's not your fault. That's how the film industry works. So on today's episode, Alex talks about why it's so hard to see African films and w...

Today on the podcast, Dr. Angelo Muredda joins Alex Heeney to discuss one of the year's best films: David Cronenberg's The Shrouds . We talk about why  The Shrouds is a good entry point if you're new to Cronenberg, but will also please diehard fans. And we discuss how what we love about Cronenberg's films isn't necessarily the selling point you'll often hear. Yes, he sometimes directs body horror,...

Alex reviews Andrew Ahn's 2025 adaptation of the 1993 film The Wedding Banquet,  starring Lily Gladstone, Youn Yuh-jung, and Joan Chen (and many more). The film is about two queer couples who end up conspiring to marry one half of each couple in exchange for a green card and money for IVF treatments. Alex discusses the film's unexpected delights — including the wonderful, tender sound design and l...