This article appeared in the November 26, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

(Darren Aronofsky, U.S., 2010)Early in Black Swan, artistic director Thomas Leroy concludes his personal synopsis of Swan Lake with the declaration that only in death does its troubled heroine find ...

Thoughtful, original film criticism delivered straight to your inbox each week.

Ranked according to the time of their last feature film release ...

(Bruce McDonald, Canada, 2008)Early on a frigid Valentine’s morning in some desolate village within the Ontario hinterland, talk radio DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) is assailed by an unidentified ...

(Nikita Mikhalkov, Russia, 2007)For numerically titled Russian movies of the moment, stick with 4 instead of 12. Old soul Nikita Mikhalkov’s appropriation of the 12 Angry Men template is a bloated ...

Within moments of meeting a woman on a train, Norman Oppenheimer offers—unsolicited— to introduce her to three prominent people. That’s how Norman operates: he’s a “fixer,” a seemingly well-connected ...

Of course, Grahame was by this time largely a figure of celluloid memory: she was the flirtatious goofus of Zinnemann’s Oklahoma!, but, more typically, she was the Ur-noir siren (of Lang’s The Big ...

For modernist poet H.D. and her contemporaries at the journal Close Up, the young medium of cinema lit up the room with soul-stirring force By Sheila O'Malley in the May-June 2020 Issue The Madonna of ...

Thoughtful, original film criticism delivered straight to your inbox each week.

Present Tense is a column by Sheila O’Malley that reflects on the intersections of film, literature, art, and culture. Tatum O’Neal in The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, 1976) “Laced with ...

I am fine, thank you. I have been so busy lately! My schedule has been very hectic for the past two years, so I am having a good rest now, recharging my batteries before starting to work again. What’s ...