He Lost It at the Movies
The film critic A.S. Hamrah came to widespread attention in the late 2000s with a new form, a knockabout variant of the capsule reviews familiar to readers of Cahiers du cinéma and Halliwell’s Film Guide. As he explains in “Remember Me on this Computer,” the introduction to his first collection The Earth Dies Streaming, he was asked by Keith Gessen, an editor at the Brooklyn-based magazine n+1, to write a column on the films nominated for the 2008 Oscars. Hamrah, about forty at the time, declined the commission, explaining that he was too busy with his work as a brand analyst. So Gessen proposed that Hamrah just watch the films and share his thoughts over the phone. “Oscar Preview” started with three sentences on driving in Michael Clayton. The entry devoted to the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, read, in its entirety, “Whenever Javier Bardem took out that pressure hose and put it to someone’s head, I kept waiting for his victim to go, ‘Ouch! Stop it! Why are you doing that? That hurts! Cut it out.’”
It was an exercise in negation, an alternative to film reviewing as practiced in the mainstream press. In Hamrah’s account, a process of dumbing-down had begun around 1990, with the arrival of “the consumer-guide approach” to film criticism invented by publications like Entertainment Weekly,which soon infected traditionally serious outlets. His work for n+1 looked for inspiration to the decades before then, an age receptive to film culture, characterized by vigor and integrity—when Pauline Kael wrote several-thousand-word dispatches for the New Yorker; a compelling newspaper reviewer like Roger Ebert could become a TV star; and cosmopolitan cinephiles such as Andrew Sarris, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and J. Hoberman made their names in film magazines and the alternative press. Those critics all published capsule versions of their longer reviews, but the presiding spirit of Hamrah’s round-ups was another figure from that brighter day, the wild and inventive Manny Farber, who wrote for the Nation and Artforum, and offered a model of the quick-fire assessment—as a form in its own right—in his reports from the New York Film Festival and his essay “Clutter,” which covered films from 1967 and 1968.
In an essay written soon after his 2008 Oscars round-up, Hamrah praised Farber for the things he refused to do. A decade later, in “Remember Me on this Computer,” he provided more or less the same list when recalling his own ambitions. Film criticism, he wrote, should not provide publicity quotes, extensive plot synopses, or facts about the past credits of directors and stars. It could be argued that a single line about a cattle prod isn’t a replacement for “boring and repetitive” film criticism but something else entirely: an experiment or jeu d’esprit, a sort of comic prose-poetry. When Farber wrote about China is Near in “Clutter,” he may have identified the director, Marco Bellocchio, only once, misspelling the surname and giving no first name. But he was sure to describe the director’s “talent for getting multiple angles on a locale” and the film’s “puzzling staccato manner.” Hamrah never relinquished his idiosyncratic tone nor surrendered his right to ramble. But by around 2010 he relaxed his strictures on conventional habits, as displayed in this passage on Christopher Nolan’s Inception:
‘Always imagine new places,’ Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) instructs, but Inception refuses to do that. It presents instantly recognizable non-places, swanky hotel bars in world capitals, vistas from James Bond movies with skiing in them, postapocalyptic landscapes from comic books. Suffused with an ahistorical sensibility, this insta-remake of Shutter Island combines the washy metaphysics of Nicolas Roeg films with Where Eagles Dare—a range of unsmiling British unfun. Terrible dialogue fights to the death with bombastic music meant to pound a ‘militarized unconscious’ into further submission, which it does.
Almost twenty years after “Oscar Preview,” Hamrah’s round-up pieces, which have appeared in The Baffler as well as n+1, remain his primary outlet as a reviewer. In the nearly one-thousand pages of The Earth Dies Streaming and its recently published follow-up Algorithm of the Night, only six new films are given standalone treatment. But since the retirement of Jonathan Rosenbaum as the film reviewer at the Chicago Reader—around the time of Hamrah’s first Oscars piece—Hamrah has become the go-to critic for Anglophone cinephiles, along with Richard Brody of the New Yorker.
Like Hamrah, Brody, who is roughly ten years his senior, has talked about the importance of early exposure to the French New Wave, especially Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and both were marked by those directors’ work as critics for Cahiers du cinéma, where they created a canon including Ingmar Bergman and Roberto Rossellini and commercial directors like Alfred Hitchcock. But there is a gulf in outlook. Whereas Brody can identify in Barbie a joyous sensibility akin to what the Cahiers critics loved about Hollywood films, Hamrah views American popular culture not as an enduring impulse but as a story of decline. Brody, though not a soft touch, is an enthusiast. Hamrah tends toward defiance. Coming of age in the early 1980s, he aligned himself with punk rock and “zine” culture and against what he calls “commercial interests” and the “one-size-fits-all mainstream.” Turning to the present day, his attitude to Rotten Tomatoes scores, streaming services, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and movie-watching on iPhones is easy to guess.
Hamrah’s combative posture serves as a rhetorical strength and a source of meaning, especially in his longer ruminative pieces. The specter of decline sharpens his sense of gratitude in two pieces about the movies of the year 2000. In one, about Spike Lee’s satire Bamboozled and Ang Lee’s martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he writes vividly of “a brief time in mainstream cinema when Black filmmakers were on the rise and American audiences were open to Asian stars and genres.” In the other, covering thirty-five films and written at a time when his feelings about cinema were exacerbated by COVID, he says that his dive into these twenty-year-old movies “threw the present into stark relief.”
Hamrah is drawn to directors such as Chantal Akerman, Orson Welles, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Stanley Kubrick, who possess a quality he variously characterizes as “hardness,” “recalcitrance,” and “stark confrontational truculence” and whose work can be read—and wielded—as a rebuke to convention, the film industry, and the critical establishment, as well as the human conduct they portray. His perspective is often overtly political. He has exposed the complicity with power and corruption displayed by the cycles of films about the Iraq War and corporations, like BlackBerry, and praised John Sayles’s Matewan and Albert Brooks’s Real Life for their representation of the US’s mistreatments of its workers and embrace of reality television. In “All Consuming Horror,” a searching piece of genre criticism, pulp material becomes a route to historical analysis:
There is no space outside consumerism. That is the principal lesson of a group of American horror and sci-fi films that began to emerge after George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968. This kind of movie, never quite a fully-formed subgenre, peaked in the second half of the 1980s and all but disappeared after 1990. It flourished in the margins of Hollywood production like a Day-Glo mold growing where the wall meets the ceiling, erupting into a splatter of exploding heads, limbs, and organs. It was a kind of polychrome spin-art that accompanied the growth of American retail into shopping centers, and into the television commercials that advertised their stores and products.
But Hamrah’s work also exhibits the drawbacks of accentuating the negative. It isn’t simply that virtue always reminds him of vice, probity of corruption, courage of cowardice, greatness of mediocrity. This is true of many writers who rely on anger as an engine. Contrast is a useful resource, and few great works of art provoke positive feelings about the general state of culture or the world. Equanimity is hardly an indispensable item in the critic’s toolkit. But Hamrah takes things to the opposite extreme—with damaging repercussions not just for his openness but for the accuracy of his descriptions and the coherence of his judgments. At times, his work ceases to resemble criticism altogether and functions instead as the portrait of a temperament.
In a review of Billy Wilder books, as he defends the director against the charge of meanness, Hamrah quotes a line from Wilder’s Fedora (itself a quotation from the producer Samuel Goldwyn): “In life you have to take the bitter with the sour.” Even in his sunnier moments, things can quickly turn to bile or disappointment, and on spurious pretexts. Asked in a recent interview what films he enjoyed last year, he named, among others, The Secret Agent and One Battle After Another, before adding, “There’s plenty of good commercial films that people can see in theaters, but the media acts like they don’t exist.” Of Farber’s characteristics, the ones that Hamrah has been keenest, or best-equipped, to emulate are a taste for a scrap and what he has called Farber’s “offhand, sometimes bizarre cruelty.” Almost as soon as he declares Greta Gerwig’s Little Women “something of a masterpiece,” he explains that he prefers the Tom Hanks comedy A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood because Chris Cooper, a supporting actor in both films, “gets to do more here” and the cinematography is more “hard-edge.” Across a longer span, “somebody named Yorgos Lanthimos” went from being an exciting new prospect (“I would see anything else by him”) to “our leading auteur of half-baked ideas”—the opening contention of what turns out to be a rave review of Poor Things, in the course of which Hamrah knocks critics who said it looked like a Tim Burton movie and “Puritans” who “will find many opportunities in it to be offended.”
Hamrah’s driving emotion is always clear, his reasoning less so. He writes that he was “confused” by the fact that although Alfonso Cuarón’s film Roma, set in the Mexico City district of that name, shares a title with a color film by Fellini, it actually reminded him of Fellini’s black-and-white films. The capsule reviews rely on fragile transitions, strained wordplay, left-field putdowns, whimsical conjecture, and non-sequiturs that in turn lead nowhere. Whenever Hamrah uses a connective word or phrase, you brace yourself for a leap. “Complaints that BlacKkKlansman valorizes cops are moot, since this film could not exist without them.” Jeff Goldblum’s character in Wicked is “underwritten considering that this was a novel before it was a Broadway show.”
Does this scattergun approach, whatever its fleeting pleasures, provide a more valuable or edifying service than, say, the straitlaced reviewing style of Manohla Dargis in the New York Times or the measured and nimble takedowns that Justin Chang has recently published in the New Yorker or the occasionally stringent but more or less generous-spirited discussions conducted by Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins on the podcast The Big Picture? Although Hamrah rails against modern inanities, his writing reflects what the eminent film scholar David Bordwell, in an essay on Roger Ebert, called “the lightspeed punditry of the Web, which favors first-response witticisms.” It is also symptomatic of a larger problem in contemporary discourse: rampant animus. Contrasting David Thomson with “the horde of cheerleading critics whose hollow praise blights the film pages,” he appeared to recognize the dangers of the alternative impulse. He wrote, “Thomson alone has made bitterness a career.” Yet one would be forgiven for thinking that Hamrah aspired to join him.
Markers of a clear critical philosophy are absent from the introductions to Hamrah’s two collections. What he offers in its place is revealing. The opening paragraph of “Remember Me on This Computer” kicks things off on a characteristically grumpy—if misleadingly personal—note. Hamrah explains that after he moved to New York in the early 2000s, newspapers in Boston “started asking me to write for them, which they hadn’t done much when I lived there.” He recalls a screening of the adultery melodrama Little Children, where hesat next to “a man I recognized”—“one of the most prominent film critics in the country”—who only started taking notes after a character is revealed as “an online porn addict.” Hamrah then reports that at another press show, another older male film critic—“a movie reviewer I’d been watching on TV my whole life”—loudly complained about the looks of the girls in the stage musical Spamalot. Hamrah doesn’t extract any lesson from this pair of anecdotes; he merely observes that the reviewers he had encountered in Boston were “an unassuming bunch.”
In the next section, Hamrah seems to plump for a more conventional way in, recalling the first time (c.1998) he saw something he had written “out in the world,” in the checkout queue of a Whole Foods in Massachusetts. But before long, he is explaining that he tried to show his article on F for Fake to the cashier, who looked at the accompanying portrait of Orson Welles and asked, “Is that you?” This time, we are given a hint as to why Hamrah has shared the reminiscence: “Wow, I thought, that was a lesson in the artist-critic divide.” That lesson would be hard to define, but at least we know that Hamrah thinks there is one.
His new collection begins with another unflattering cameo. In December 2019, Hamrah introduced himself to a “prominent older critic” on a Brooklyn subway platform and found him “polite and engaging.” The critic reads The Earth Dies Streaming and suggests a meeting. At the end of the encounter he tells Hamrah: “Writers could be film critics in this country from the 1940s to the 1980s. Not anymore. See ya!” Hamrah says he was amazed at the man’s “restraint in not adding ‘don’t quit your day job.’” But the intended message can hardly have been that film reviewing is no longer a dependable career, and it’s odd that Hamrah would take it that way. In the Farber essay, he notes that film criticism was not a “lifelong profession” for the “American film critics of the past we still read today” and even laments the fact that it later became “a sinecure for certain writers.” He also agrees that the 1980s marked the start of the downturn. That was when, as he writes on another occasion, film criticism “caved in without a fight.” But then Hamrah’s position, here as elsewhere, is informed not by his beliefs or his vast knowledge of the subject but by a reflexive tendency to dissent, dismiss, lash out.
His ruminations on film history are frequently undermined by this relentless oppositional viewpoint. Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, Hamrah tells us, “moved feature filmmaking in America away from the Tarantino-inspired, tough-guys boy’s [sic] club of the mid-1990s into a more deviant and perverse, less binary realm.” But his argument gets lost amid a barrage of reference points, more than thirty films arranged into a dizzying set of categories (among them movies from 1995 “like” Seven, Casino, and Braveheart). Before we have had any time to appreciate what Solondz’s filmbrought about, Hamrah is complaining about American Beauty, “Hollywood shameploitation,” the indie movement mumblecore, and “CGI-heavy fantasy blockbusters.”
All roads, however improbably, lead back to the commercial menace. In a lively review of the director Barry Sonnenfeld’s memoir, Hamrah explains that Men in Black 3 was shot in the same part of Brooklyn as On the Waterfront and then invokes “the history of Hollywood filmmaking from black-and-white neorealist drama to huge-budget action spectacle—from movies about the kind of people who had lived here and worked as longshoremen unloading ships, to movies about aliens from outer space.” After watching a reissue of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), Hamrah laments that the success of Jaws (1975) ended the exhilarating director-driven era known as the New Hollywood. But there were a number of factors—notably a downturn in many directors’ commercial fortunes—behind the studios’ decision to revert to a more familiar model. He also speculates that Coppola may have felt “energized” to oversee the new print of The Conversation after giving an interview in which he slammed superhero movies.
A piece on the making of another film from 1974, Chinatown, closes with a similar downbeat trajectory. The “tragedy” depicted in Roman Polanski’s film, we are told,“extends into the career of its star”: “By the end of the ’80s, Nicholson was playing the Joker in Batman.” Suddenly we are learning that Jack Nicholson “made a fortune” on that movie because he had a share of the profits, “which he did not have on Chinatown,” as if that film had been some kind of community arts project. Then comes the pay-off: “Forget it, Jack. It’s comic books.” Even readers who catch the allusion to the film’s final lines will surely struggle with its import.What is Hamrah saying, other than that artistic high-points may be succeeded by randomly selected evidence of decline?
The sense of freedom Hamrah found in the original Oscars round-up, which he described as “the easiest thing I’d ever written,” is replicated in his longer pieces through the recourse to cheats, shortcuts, and misrepresentations of people he disdains. In an essay on the use of artificial intelligence in movies, conceptual clarity is sacrificed in favor of obstinate pedantry. We are told that in an interview Brady Corbet, the director of The Brutalist, defended his tweaking of actors’ Hungarian accents with reference to an exchange in terrible faux-Norwegian in North By Northwest. Then Hamrah reveals that the dialogue in question appears in Torn Curtain, and he likens Corbet’s comment to an AI-style “‘hallucination’ in which previously stored data is incorrectly combined to fabricate details.” But there was no fabrication, or even combination. Corbet simply referred to the wrong Hitchcock spy film, and Hamrah’s reader is left none the wiser as to why he thinks Corbet’s argument is faulty and his decision to use the AI tool is appalling. (What makes this different from Ang Lee’s digital erasure of the wires from which the actors were suspended in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?)
In the Chinatown article, Hamrah alleges that the film historian Sam Wasson, wanting to emphasize the importance of Chinatown in his book The Big Goodbye, “fudges the history” of Nicholson’s early career and omits to cite films, such as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, that “aren’t iconic enough for current pop-culture legibility.” In fact, Wasson touches repeatedly on what Nicholson did before Chinatown and names all six films on the list.To buttress this portrayal, Hamrah presents Wasson as a cynical peddler of entertainment lore: the author of a book on the making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and another book on Bob Fosse that was adapted into a TV series—a fate that, Hamrah argues, Wasson hoped to replicate with The Big Goodbye.He does not say that Wasson studied film at Wesleyan, where Hamrah himself, who grew up in rural Connecticut, got his teenage film education, attending public screenings put on by Wasson’s mentor, Jeanine Basinger. Nor are we told that for a series published by the university’s academic press, Wasson published a book-length interview with the director Paul Mazursky.
The cumulative effect is to make Hamrah appear as a lone warrior, the final holdout in a landscape dominated by gulls and fakes, or at least primus inter pares in a select like-minded community that cares about standards and recognizes the title Easy Rider. In a defense of Sofia Coppola against her implacable critics, he writes, “Winning Best Director at Cannes for The Beguiled somehow only added to her image as a dilettante.” Did it really? Reflecting on Emilie Bickerton’s history of Cahiers du cinéma as part of a round-up, Hamrah alleges that she uses a footnote “to describe the plot” of Godard’s Weekend, “citing somebody else to explain a seminal film she could have easily seen.” The passage in question describes a lateral tracking shot in Tout va bien, then—in the footnote—describes its earlier use in Weekend,and cites Brian Henderson’s essay “Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style” about Godard’s use of this technique.
One misrepresentation can lead to another. Marking the death of David Lynch last year, Hamrah writes that it’s “important to remember” the director’s rough handling by the “middlebrow” critical establishment. He claims that an unidentified New Yorker film critic “instantly dismissed Twin Peaks: The Return as soon as the first episode ended.” What really happened was that Brody published an ambivalent article about the first two episodes but ended up hailing the series as “one of the great recent cinematic achievements.” Climbing the critical ladder, Hamrah takes aim at the “highest-browed American,” the Marxist cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, claiming that he had described Lynch’s work as “evil.” In fact, Jameson argued that Blue Velvet responded to “glossy images” of the past with a “new and more complex” form of “postnostalgia,” in which Evil is represented at a remove. (In the same passage, Jameson referred to being “so often taken to task for my arguments against ethics.”)
Hamrah then moves onto a critic whose work he knows a lot better, Phillip Lopate, stating that his recent collection reprinted “a piece on the inadequacy of Mulholland Drive.” That would be the piece that begins by calling the film “compelling, engrossing, well directed, sexy, moving, beautiful to look at, mysterious, and satisfying.” Hamrah doesn’t explain why Lopate, whom he describes as “this dean of American film critics,” is not entitled to his negative opinion. When, back in the 1960s, Pauline Kael took aim at colleagues such as Bosley Crowther of the New York Times and Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic or, for that matter, a leading cultural theorist like Siegfried Kracauer, she engaged in the habit that Hamrah notably refrains from: She quoted their words.
Hamrah’s insistence on presenting accomplishment as inherently anomalous undermines many of his efforts at appreciation. Consider this take on two of his favorite directors: “The urge to give in to entertainment is strong in most filmmakers, and the ones who ignore it are too self-conscious. Akerman and Kubrick avoided that by making demands on producers and on the audience and not giving in.” We emerge with a far stronger sense of the potential pitfalls than how they were effectively sidestepped—of the ailments than the cure. Similarly, in a 2011 piece on the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, Hamrah argues that “unlike other writers who took the opportunity after Susan Sontag’s death to memorialize their encounters with her,” Rosenbaum “acknowledges her influence, then treats her affectionately—his Sontag plays the jukebox and sashays over to the cigarette machine, Godard-style.” It’s hard to see what fresh path Rosenbaum is supposed to be forging here—what makes him unlike Sontag’s other memorializing writer-acquaintances. We look to Hamrah’s next line for expansion or clarification, but in vain: “Part of Rosenbaum’s appeal is his ease and comfort in a world of arts and letters he is confident and gracious enough to put to good use.”
In a more recent encomium, from 2022, Hamrah proves unable to celebrate the critic Serge Daney, who started writing in the mid-1960s, without marking him out as ahead of the curve. He calls Daney the “earliest” film critic to analyze the differences between cinema and television. What about André Bazin, Daney’s predecessor as editor of Cahiers du cinéma, who died when Daney was fourteen, having published essays like “Television and the Revival of Cinema”? Hamrah commends Daney for identifying Diane Keaton as “the co-creator of Annie Hall”; in fact, Daney’s concept of “star-sharing” didn’t extend beyond crediting Keaton’s contribution as a performer. (She is name-checked only once in a substantial review.) And even though Hamrah stresses the importance of the collection he is introducing, he cannot resist identifying a downside. Translating the title of Daney’s collection of essays La Maison cinéma et le monde as The Cinema House and the World instead of The Cinema Home and the World, he claims, “renders Daney homeless.” He adds, “such is the fate of the film critic in the age of streaming and the pandemic.”
In one sense, the most confounding thing that Hamrah has published is a 2018 essay called “Movie Stars in Bathtubs.” Listed on the contents page of his new collection by gnomic headline alone, it turns out to be a serial snapshot of the history of cinema, by way of forty-eight movies, plus two events (one of them being the founding of Cahiers). Hamrah explores the beautifully unnerving opening of Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (with Bernard Herrmann’s score over the turning Universal globe and the spoken credits), the mobile camerawork in the closing sequence of Rossellini’s The Rise of Louis XIV, and the brutal comic logic that powers the restaurant scene in Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid. Across forty pages, there’s not a straw man or bogeyman in sight, unless you count hailing John Carpenter as “the anti-Spielberg and the anti-Lucas.” A reference to the “Sundance-ification” of non-studio filmmaking, in the segment on Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise (1984), sounds a note of declinism, but soon after Hamrah is celebrating Chris Smith’s American Job (1997), made in the Midwest for roughly $14,000. He ends with Brian de Palma’s Femme Fatale, a brilliant and misunderstood film that he chooses to emphasize only as the former (“his most abstract and satisfying thriller”).
It’s thrilling to witness Hamrah in this cooler mode, with the short format being used as a vehicle for description, information, and praise. But it feels tantalizing too, as a glimpse of what might have been. “Movie Stars in Bathtubs” appears as the final item in Algorithm of the Night. In chronological terms, though, it was the earliest, having appeared in 2007 in a book on the history of movies. The following spring, Hamrah telephoned Gessen outside 72nd Street subway stop and embarked on a critical journey of a very different kind.
Leo Robson is the author of a novel, The Boys (2025), an assistant editor at Literary Review, and a regular contributor to the New York Times, New Left Review, and other publications
