Seventh Row Podcast

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...