As movies have morphed from a vibrant public event into a product we watch on our personal screens, film criticism has also been disrupted thanks to apps like Letterboxd. Fortunately, film critic A. S. Hamrah hasn’t gotten the memo. He is an insurrectionary voice in a time of critical complacency. Hamrah, who contributes reviews to Bookforum, n+1 and the Baffler, wields his pen like a flame thrower, lambasting Hollywood’s decline in a trenchant voice spiked with barbed wit while also shining a light on great marginalized films.
Hamrah has recently published two new books: a collection of his reviews called “Algorithm of the Night,” as well as a compilation of Hollywood news items called “Last Week in End Times Cinema” that reads like a doom scroll of cultural decay. I chatted with Hamrah about Marvel, Pauline Kael and AI.
✍️ Author Chat
A. S. Hamrah is a film critic and author of the recently published books “Algorithm of the Night” and “Last Week in End Times Cinema.”
(Courtesy of A. S. Hamrah)
Both of these books really describe the end of an era for movies, what you call the end of a worldview. What do you mean by that?
I think the goal of the studios, Netflix in particular, is not just to end theatrical exhibition but to end a certain way of understanding the cinema and to just turn it into television. The merger of cinema and television is very bad for cinema.
In the past, when existential threats of film reared their head, whether it was television or videocassette recorders, there was a sense of movies having to work harder to maintain its supremacy. But if everything is film, then there is no countervailing force. It all just merges into one thing.
People who watch a lot of TV were seen as kind of not really up to life in some ways. But it was never the goal of TV to crush cinema, which is the case now. Someone like Ted Sarandos at Netflix, his whole thing is based on pretending that no one likes to go to the movies anymore, when, in fact, millions of people all over the world love going to the movies.
I feel like your criticism is not about thumbs up, thumbs down. Even when you write a negative review, it’s fun to argue against it. You are creating a dialogue with your readers.
I don’t write a negative review to stop people from seeing a film. I want them to see it and make up their own mind about it. I also really try to avoid writing anything that can be extrapolated for a movie ad. I don’t want my stuff to be taken out of context and thrown onto a movie poster.
“Algorithm of the Night” is a collection of reviews by film critic A. S. Hamrah.
(Courtesy of A. S. Hamrah)
What critics inspired you?
Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael. The writer who had the biggest influence on me is Manny Farber, for the way he thinks about things and the freedom of his writing.
“Last Week in End Times Cinema” is the most depressing book I read last year, just a desultory litany of headlines about movie reboots, the creeping influence of AI on film, and so on.
When I first started publishing these, people thought I was making them up. I started culling them with great joy and mirth, but as the year progressed, with the wildfires in LA, the whole project became much more dire. And the death of David Lynch was a real blow, I thought.
You take a dim view of AI.
It seems to be Hollywood’s goal to not have any human beings involved in filmmaking. Why pay Will Smith $20 million when you can have an AI voice? But they’ve been preparing the ground for this since the beginning of the century. It feels like the whole system of production of Marvel films is already a form of AI. They’re trying to educate audiences into liking garbage, and that is what I mean when I write about the death of a worldview.
What films did you like last year?
“The Secret Agent,” “The Mastermind,” “Bugonia.” I saw “One Battle After Another” twice. There’s plenty of good commercial films that people can see in theaters, but the media acts like they don’t exist.
(This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
📰 The Week(s) in Books
“One of the reasons I decided to focus on Orange County is that it’s not the norm — not what you think of as the Deep South. It’s Disneyland. It’s California,” author Eric Lichtblau says.
(Photos by Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times, Little Brown Company)
Costa Bevan Pappas has a chat with Eric Litchtblau about his new book “American Reich,” which explores the roots of white supremacy in Orange County. “One of the reasons I decided to focus on Orange County is that it’s not the norm — not what you think of as the Deep South,” Lichtblau tells Pappas. “It’s Disneyland. It’s California. These are people who are trying to take back America from the shores of Orange County because it’s gotten too brown in their view.”
Xialou Guo has crafted a radical remix of “Moby Dick” titled “Call Me Ishmaelle,” and Leanne Ogasawara is enchanted: “There is so much pleasure to be had in rereading old favorites — and part of the joy is meeting beloved characters, who have been updated or somehow arrive in a new form to resist old tropes and types.”
A year after the wildfires, L.A. native Jacob Soboroff has written “Firestorm,” and he sat down with Mariella Rudi to discuss the first book to be written about the calamity. “For me, it’s a much more personal book,” Soboroff says. “It’s about experiencing what I came to understand as the fire of the future. It’s about people as much as politics.”
Finally, Bethanne Patrick gives us the lowdown on January’s must-read book, while Eva Recinos gives us the five best science books of 2025.
📖 Bookstore Faves
Josh Spencer, owner of the Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, opened a second location of the book store at 4437 Lankershim Blvd.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Ever since it opened a little over a year ago, Josh Spencer’s second edition of The Last Bookstore has grown a vibrant community of Valley-dwelling book lovers hungry for a store that sells newly published titles and a curated selection of second-hand gems. I chatted with store manager Shane Danielson about what customers are excited about right now.
What’s selling right now at the Valley store?
Right now film adaptations current and upcoming are driving a lot of our fiction sales – “Frankenstein,” Pynchon’s “Vineland” (for “One Battle After Another”), “Wuthering Heights.” Certain “brand name” authors always do well: Brandon Sanderson, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut. But generally, our stock is so diverse that it’s hard to spot broader trends.
What kind of community has gathered around the store?
We have a growing community of literate, curious, frequently funny, often politically-engaged readers and book lovers, both young and not-so-young, who see reading and things like book groups as an act of resistance to the dominant culture. They want to turn off their screens for a while, and give themselves over to the longer narrative and deeper pleasures that a book provides.
What specific genres are popular?
Plays and books about acting sell every day – unsurprising, since we’re close to the Warner Bros. and Universal studios as well as two local theatre schools. Horror, science fiction and fantasy are perennials; and an increasing number of women, presumably disillusioned with real-world dating options, are enthusiastic consumers of “romantasy” authors like Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J. Maas. Classics also do surprisingly well: people seem to be reading an awful lot of Dostoevsky and George Orwell and Jane Austen. Which is encouraging.
We know how difficult it is in this culture to make folks care about books. Do you still find in people that desire — to read, and to explore through books? Are people still curious to learn about the world via books as opposed to ChatGPT?
Many of our customers say they treasure the physicality of a book – its heft, the tactility of the pages – as opposed to the frictionless experience of reading on a Kindle or another device. And interestingly, they all say variations on the same thing, which is that those other reading experiences just don’t stick; for whatever reason, they don’t retain much of what they’ve read afterward.
The Last Bookstore in Studio City is located in 4437 Lankershim Blvd.
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