Seventh Row is a nonprofit Canadian film criticism publication and publishing house. We're dedicated to helping you expand your horizons by curating the best socially progressive films from around the world and helping you think deeply about them. This newsletter is run by Seventh Row (http://seventh-row.com) but features exclusive content not found on the website.
Fresh from the Berlin Film Festival...
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I'm technically writing to you from Toronto, where the snow is starting to melt, and the skies are still stubbornly grey. Even though I'm not at the Berlinale in person, my disembodied voice was there this morning at a panel on how we're discussing, talking about, and thinking about film in 2026. (Which means my talk was something I recorded, and you can listen to it! Even if, like me, you're on a different continent right now.) Most of the wonderful panellists were discussing their work to put films in front of new audiences (through online platforms, TV stations, and programming) or how film criticism has evolved beyond written reviews. (The Hollywood Reporter is on YouTube. And OFC people like me are in your podcast feed.) I talked about something else. Not how we find or watch films — but what we do once we’ve seen them. Film festivals give us an excellent structure for discovering films. They make encountering new work easy and exciting. We don't have the same kind of structure for what happens after we've watched them. Most spaces are about stating a take, talking about a film once, and moving on. But what if you’re not done with it yet? At Seventh Row, I've been designing spaces that give you the structure to discover something new in a film — not just discover a new film. That's what I spoke about at the Berlinale. Now on the podcast feed, you can hear me (and my still disembodied voice) talk about:
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Seventh Row
Seventh Row is a nonprofit Canadian film criticism publication and publishing house. We're dedicated to helping you expand your horizons by curating the best socially progressive films from around the world and helping you think deeply about them. This newsletter is run by Seventh Row (http://seventh-row.com) but features exclusive content not found on the website.
Mike Leigh just premiered what he thinks will be his final film, Tender Loving Care. I'm seeing it this week at TIFF. And it's got me thinking again about some of the things I learned making a book about his filmmaking process that changed how I look at films that have nothing to do with Mike Leigh. When I saw Peterloo at TIFF in 2018, I couldn't understand how Leigh could fill a scene with people and somehow make every one of them feel like an individual rather than an anonymous crowd. So I...
Julie spends most of The Worst Person in the World trying to work out what kind of life she wants. She changes degrees. She changes relationships. She keeps discovering that the life she thought she wanted no longer quite fits. From the outside, it could look like she just can’t make up her mind. But that’s not how it feels to watch her. Somehow, throughout the film, we always seem to understand: When something in Julie’s life stops feeling like it fits What Julie thinks her options are How...
Charli XCX declared last summer "Joachim Trier Summer" — and Elle Fanning arrived at Cannes in agreement: This summer, I thought: why not make Joachim Trier Summer something you can actually join? So I'm hosting it — and you're invited. If you've been here a while then you probably already know there are few filmmakers whose work I love as much as Joachim Trier's. I named his Oslo, August 31st the best film of the 2010s, Sentimental Value the best film of 2025 — and I'm working on a book on...