Career
Rickey is the film critic at The Philadelphia Inquirer and often contributes to The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Village Voice. Her essays are collected in many books including The American Century and American Movie Critics. During her tenure as a movie reviewer she covered technological evolutions in the industry from the video revolution to the rise of digital film, and has profiled artists and filmmakers from Clint Eastwood and Sidney Poitier to Elizabeth Taylor and Nora Ephron.
Rickey grew up in Los Angeles, California, where she developed a lifelong interest in film.
She attended the University of California, San Diego (Bachelor of Arts 1974, Master of Fine Arts 1976) where she studied with Manny Farber and worked as his teaching assistant. From 1980 to 1983, Rickey was a film critic at the Village Voice.
She wrote one of the first retrospectives of the work of filmmaker Ida Lupino and one of the first considerations of filmmaker David Cronenberg. She then became a film critic for The Boston Herald (1984-1985) and also wrote for Artforum and Art in America as an art critic.
In 1986, she became the film critic at The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Rickey has written essays on many artists such as Leon Golub and Philip Guston and wrote the Criterion Collection essays for Broadcast News and Videodrome. She is included in the book Feminists Who Changed America for her role in chronicling the work and the progress of women artists and filmmakers in articles and catalogue essays. Rickey contributed chapters to The Power of Feminist Art, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, among many other collections.