A.S. Hamrah joins filmmaker and novelist Sandi Tan to discuss criticism and Hamrah's two new books Algorithm of the Night and Last Week in End Times Cinema.
Copies of both titles will be available for sale in the shop.
“Today, the only critic I can think of is A. S. Hamrah.”
Algorithm of the Night
“Unerring” (Bookforum), “hilarious” (Dana Spiotta), “our age’s most irreplaceable critic” (Guernica), “a genius” (Kenyon Review), A. S. Hamrah returns with an extraordinary collection of his best film writing for n+1, The Baffler, the New York Review of Books, the Criterion Collection, and other publications. Algorithm of the Night assembles Hamrah’s essays on films and filmmakers and his inimitable, aphoristic reviews—a body of work that, taken together, presents a powerful alternative to a culture mired in publicity and stale convention. A journey through the overlapping dystopias of the Trump years, the Covid years, and the Trump years, Algorithm of the Night attends with remarkable style and precision to a film industry in self-imposed crisis, a chronicle of failures and occasional miracles from AI to The Zone of Interest. Against the tides of ignorance and solipsism, Algorithm of the Night is film criticism as literature and—perhaps—prophecy.
Last Week in End Times Cinema
From A. S. Hamrah, the film critic at n+1 and the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018, comes this unique archive of unfortunate movie bulletins, compiled for his weekly newsletter, Last Week in End Times Cinema, and presented here in digest form.
These customized batches of misfortune and upheaval record a full year of wrong thinking, bad decisions, and man-made disasters from the world of filmmaking. Set against the backdrop of the crazed push for AI, the wildfires in Los Angeles, and the reelection of Donald Trump, the general disaster of current commercial cinema in the age of streaming platforms, theater closures, and the dead-end reliance on IP franchising becomes apparent. As the Hollywood film industry plunged into near irrelevance, these weekly roundups tracked every passing mistake, every easily avoided blunder, every up-to-the-minute example of unnecessary garbage as it emerged from the content mills of our newly tech-based movie business.
Presented without commentary, footnotes, or links, inspired by Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines and the Coffee News, this compilation lists filmland items in naked form, stripped of any ameliorating showbiz happy talk. As Fred Allen once wrote about Hollywood, beneath all that phony tinsel there is real tinsel. Here it is, all the shiny nothingness of an industry gone astray.
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