Published by Film at Lincoln Center

Sheila O'Malley

Present Tense: Back-ting

By Sheila O'Malley
July 25, 2019
Can’t look away: the nearly lost art of acting with back to the camera

Present Tense: What Happened Was…

By Sheila O'Malley
July 11, 2019
Alone together: Tom Noonan’s two-hander is an unblinking look at the havoc loneliness can wreak on humans

TCM Diary: The Chemistry Set

By Sheila O'Malley
July 2, 2019
Explosive combinations: the elective affinities at work in Jack Conway’s Love Crazy and George Stevens’s The More the Merrier

Present Tense: Sylvia Plath Goes to the Movies

By Sheila O'Malley
June 27, 2019
Something fresh and strange: newly released letters reveal the prominent presence of movies in the poet’s life

Present Tense: Rolling Thunder Revue

By Sheila O'Malley
June 12, 2019
I contain multitudes: on Dylan, Whitman, and Scorsese’s new Rolling Thunder Revue documentary

TCM Diary: They Were Expendable

By Sheila O'Malley
June 6, 2019
World on fire: in an increasingly dire situation, John Ford’s characters look to the skies or out to sea, hoping for intervention

Present Tense: Infinite Brando

By Sheila O'Malley
May 31, 2019
Tennis anyone? In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace gets at the heart of Brando’s art

Present Tense: Almost Like Falling in Love

By Sheila O'Malley
May 16, 2019
Love is a battlefield: Aliens’ Hicks and Ripley are an unlikely pair, but “unlikely pairs” are the bread and butter of romance, Hollywood-style

Present Tense: Frank O’Hara at the Movies

By Sheila O'Malley
May 2, 2019
“Darkness embossed by silvery images”: the New York-School poet had a rapturous relationship with the cinema

I Know Where I’m Going

By Sheila O'Malley
May 1, 2019
In Joanna Hogg's sublime breakout The Souvenir, a budding artist strives to stay true to her path despite a consuming romance

TCM Diary: Man of Aran

By Sheila O'Malley
March 6, 2019
Truth in fiction: Robert Flaherty's 1934 "documentary" remains an astounding depiction of a landscape that still shocks and stuns

TCM Diary: Sounder

By Sheila O'Malley
February 12, 2019
Dirt roads and green fields: remarkable performances by Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson punctuate Martin Ritt's 1972 family classic

In Memoriam: Nicolas Roeg

By Sheila O'Malley
January 2, 2019
The cinematographer turned director blew our minds to show better what makes us tick

TCM Diary: The Canterville Ghost

By Sheila O'Malley
October 16, 2018
Speaking of spooky: Charles Laughton excels in a superior adaptation of an Oscar Wilde yarn, American style

Review: Private Life

By Sheila O'Malley
October 1, 2018
(Tamara Jenkins, USA, Netflix, Opening September 21)

TCM Diary: Dorothy Malone Knows

By Sheila O'Malley
July 31, 2018
Voice of experience: the Hollywood actress brought a sense of hard-won wisdom and forthrightness to The Big Sleep, Tarnished Angels, and more

TCM Diary: High Society

By Sheila O'Malley
June 29, 2018
The right sort: Rhode Island airs are front and center in the 1956 musical adaptation of The Philadelphia Story, but how does the cast measure up?

The River’s Roar

By Sheila O'Malley
May 1, 2018
Mary Ellen Bute’s Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake listens to the stream-of-consciousness song of a synesthetic masterwork

TCM Diary: Love Me or Leave Me

By Sheila O'Malley
February 19, 2018
It felt like a kiss: on Doris Day and James Cagney’s under-seen film about abusive showbiz romance

Love, After a Fashion

By Sheila O'Malley
January 3, 2018
With elegant force, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread curls round an ineffable, unstable romantic attention without which life is unlivable