“A. S. Hamrah’s writing on film is a delight. . . . Like all the best criticism, his writing makes art and life feel less lonely.” —Elif Batuman
“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.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: A Total Breakdown of All the Easter
Eggs
1. We Can Still Think Our Own Thoughts
2. Double Squibs with Hamburger Meat
3. The Shallow Now
4. The MoMA Gramercy
5. Stay Near the Tree
6. Welcome to Violence
7. Dutch Angles
8. Dreams Are Lost Memories
9. Every Moment Between Human Beings
10. All We Got in Common
11. Money Is an Iron
12. Thread Count
13. The Work of Fate
14. The Other Guy Being Socialism
15. Zero Hour Contracts
16. The Old Bamboo
17. All-Consuming Horror
18. Slime Regained
19. In Three Years We Can Quit Chicken Sexing
20. Postcard from Home
21. The Bitter with the Sour
22. Time Is a Rabid Dog
23. Inside the Special People Club
24. Cinema Is Never on Time
25. The World Was Just an Address
26. The Captain’s Dinner Is Coming Up
27. Sound Sleeper
28. Riding the Elephant
29. Persistence of Mission
30. Objects in Space at a Moment in Time
31. Beyond the Visible
32. This Glass, This Drink, This Countertop, Our
Bodies
33. The Business of Nostalgia
34. A Young, Honest Guy Like Himself
35. Time to Face Reality
36. Vacuum Studies
37. Agnès All Along
38. Oil Paintings at the Dentist’s Office
39. Enemy of the Good
40. Movie Stars in Bathtubs
Acknowledgments
Index of Titles
Index of Names
About the Author :
A. S. Hamrah is the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018. He is the film critic for n+1 and writes for a number of other publications, including Harper’s, Bookforum, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Fast Company, The Baffler, and the Criterion Collection. He has worked as a movie theater projectionist, a semiotic brand analyst in the television industry, a political pollster, a football cinematographer, and for the film director Raúl Ruiz. He produced the feature-length documentary Bunker, directed by Jenny Perlin, which was the opening night film at the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight in 2022. He lives in New York.
Review :
Praise for The Earth Dies Streaming
“A. S. Hamrah’s criticism is hilarious, irreverent, full of passionate and ingeniously defended judgments. He can be relied upon to push things to a point of delightful perversity, which is part of what makes his work so fun (truly fun) to read. But he is also up to something subversive and political: his work brilliantly torpedoes the tedious conventions, commodifications, and clichés of the corporate entertainment complex.” —Dana Spiotta
“Hamrah is committed to his ambivalence, conveying it with a mixture of precision and conviction that will remind you how much more there is to be gleaned from a review than whether a movie is ‘good ’ or ‘bad ’ (even if it’s a movie you happen to deem very good or very bad indeed) . . . A political awareness imbues Hamrah’s criticism without weighing it down. He doesn’t succumb to a leaden moralizing because he pays close attention to the medium he’s writing about, alert to what he sees and hears.” —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
“Hamrah’s writing on movies—he’s the film critic for n+1—is form-bending, disobedient, saturated with history, and at times deliciously nasty. Neither hatchet man nor pushover, Hamrah makes exacting technical judgments while maintaining both levity and a sense of moral stakes. His book is a totem to the crucial role of scrutiny in the era of the fanboy and the recapper.” —Christian Lorentzen, New York Best Books of 2018
“Indispensable . . . A procession of ideas that speak with unrivaled immediacy to the cultural moment . . . Operating outside of the model that Hollywood expects and relies upon in its advertising, A. S. Hamrah’s columns stand alone in their ability to evoke what it feels like to go to the movies in the 21st century . . . The Earth Dies Streaming solidifies Hamrah’s place as our age’s most irreplaceable critic.”
—Kyle Paoletta, Guernica
“For the past decade, A.S. Hamrah has been the sharp-tongued, rain-lashed drifter of American movie criticism . . . Invigorating . . . Essential reading.”
—Max Nelson, The Nation
“One of our most unerring critics, A. S. Hamrah is a soothsayer, a sidesplitter, a crank, and a moralist. . . . [He] preserves criticism as a form of resistance, and as a form unto itself.”
—Jennifer Krasinski, Bookforum
“A.S. Hamrah is one of the most incisive film critics working today. His capsule reviews—two to three neat paragraphs—get right to the point, homing in on a particular detail from or angle on a film, and connecting it to larger currents in cinema. He’s pithy, evocative, and mordantly funny—a voice that cuts through the din.”
—The A.V. Club
“The Earth Dies Streaming [is] 433 pages of acute, often brilliant writing. And also often funny as hell.”
—Gerald Peary, The Arts Fuse
“A. S. Hamrah rides into film-crit town like The Man With No Name, delivering rough justice. He tells the truth, mordantly and precisely, and is witty, engaging, and painfully accurate whether he is trashing some Hollywood parade float or salvaging a zero-budget foreign independent nobody else bothered to see. His book manages to be at once chillingly ominous and just optimistic enough for our grim time.”
—Lucy Sante
“An essential compendium of A. S. Hamrah’s film writing.”
—Screen Slate
“The Earth Dies Streaming is a wry catalogue of our cinematic present . . . The essays, which range from capsule reviews of a few paragraphs to elaborate career profiles, are marked by acerbic wit and droll insight. Hamrah’s writing distills grim political realities into commentary that is quick and cutting. Taken together, the collection is an irreverent and addictive index of our cultural present.”
—TANK Magazine
“A. S. Hamrah’s writing on film is a delight. I don’t know anyone else who does roundups like that, where he goes through like ten movies and it always feels cumulative and hilarious and somehow life-affirming, like everyone is unwittingly—some less wittingly than others—working through the same problems facing film-producing civilizations at the moment. Like all the best criticism, The Earth Dies Streaming makes art and life feel less lonely.”
—Elif Batuman
“One of the very best books from this dispiriting year. . . . A. S. Hamrah is great company, a friend. He does what most writers ought to do better. He makes unexpected arguments about cultural texts, in an idiom that is undogmatic and comprehensible, and he changes how we make arguments about our own inmost arks of books and films. . . . Hamrah is a genius.”
—Kenyon Review
“You learn something even when Hamrah is beating up a movie you like . . . Hamrah practices the kind of acid criticism that divines the difference between gold and iron pyrite . . . Today, it’s quite hard to tell where the political spectacle begins and the cinematic spectacle ends. But pull threads as deftly as Hamrah does, and the whole ugly tapestry falls apart.”
—Metro Silicon Valley
“Finally, a collection from A. S. Hamrah, a film critic who qualifies as an auteur— formally creative, convention-busting, and always insightful. Reading Hamrah on movies is almost always better than seeing the actual movies themselves.”
—Astra Taylor
“A. S. Hamrah’s capsule reviews of commercial releases in The Earth Dies Streaming—nobody explores the explosive art of the capsule like Hamrah—are threaded together to form great frescos of roiling discontent: discontent with the state of the cinema, the state of America, the state of things generally. A must-read.”
—Adrian Martin, Film Alert 101
“A. S. Hamrah’s lucid, lively writing is so far removed from the tired conventions and polemics of contemporary film reviewing that he sometimes seems to be forging a genre of his own. His arguments are original and he wears his wide-ranging erudition lightly. The Earth Dies Streaming is a reminder that the best film critics care deeply about cinema but not only about cinema.”
—Dennis Lim
“Renata Adler once described the best film critics as those ‘without reverent or consistent strategies,’ who put movies ‘idiosyncratically alongside things they cared about in other ways.’ A. S. Hamrah does exactly that in every piece in this tonic collection.”
—Melissa Anderson
“The best collection of 21st century film criticism I’ve encountered . . . fresh, politically conscious and funky.” —whatchareading.com
“Like Agee on Film for the coming apocalypse.”
—Peter Keough
