Dec 12, 2025
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...
Oct 20, 2025
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,...
Sep 18, 2025
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...
Sep 15, 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 about the ways that commerce and fashion (and medicine) shape and damage women's bodies.
As a Winocour fan and researcher since 2015, Alex...
Sep 8, 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-affirming care — and connects it to two others, from Canada and France, that reveal how patriarchy, money, and bureaucracy shape queer and...