Seventh Row Podcast

194. Tender Loving Care: Mike Leigh's wonderful film about what care can and can't do

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 tende

193. TIFF: Why Stuffed, the taxidermy romance starring Jodie Comer and Harry Melling, needed to be a musical

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. I

192. How do you tell a story about healing from shared trauma when the characters can't talk about it?

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

191. Why great TV asks for more than a binge

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 e

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

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 almo

189. Berlinale: a Sámi musical, a queer Black South African film, and an 1800s queer period drama

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 looki

188. My Berlinale talk: Why the first conversation about a film shouldn't be the last

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 in

187. Sound of Falling + Interview with Mascha Schilinski

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,

186. Heated Rivalry: the queer Canadian hockey romance taking the internet by storm

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 fa

185. Chloé Zhao's Hamnet with Angelo Muredda

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

184. What Happens When You Apply 'Yes, And' to Film Discussions

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 y

183. The Choral (TIFF 2025) with Ralph Fiennes: When queer characters don't make a queer film

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

182. Couture (with Angelina Jolie) and Alice Winocour's traumatized bodies (TIFF 2025)

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

181. Between Dreams and Hope and queer survival (TIFF 2025)

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

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

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 sh

179. What if we told stories about women beyond their love lives?

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?

178. What happened when Hazel trusted my film curation

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

177. 45 Years (dir. Andrew Haigh) with Lindsay Pugh (10th anniversary)

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 Heene

176. Materialists (dir. Celine Song)

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) choos

175. How three very different films ended up in conversation

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