IN DECEMBER, A. S. Hamrah released two books: Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019–2025, his second collection of movie criticism, and Last Week in End Times Cinema, which compiles a newsletter he wrote for a year beginning in the spring of 2024, chronicling the degradations of the film industry. This conversation took place at a diner in Brooklyn two days before Christmas.
CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN: Algorithm of the Night kicks off in 2018 at the end of the era of MoviePass, runs through the coronavirus pandemic, and ends with what you call the unrealized Kamala Harris era of American cinema. What effect did those events and the politics of the era have on film going and film criticism?
A. S. HAMRAH: MoviePass was a great thing, a fantastic, golden age of film-going. I saw so many films with MoviePass. I mentioned this in the introduction to The Earth Dies Streaming. I saw The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach at the Quad Cinema using MoviePass. Before the pandemic, I thought it was kind of second rate for critics to watch films at home and review them by watching them via links, seeing them on their computer screen or on a flatscreen TV. But since the pandemic, that’s been normalized, and I think a lot of critics would rather just watch things at home, even though I consider that an illegitimate way to review first-run films. One of the problems with the era of the pandemic in terms of film criticism was that film critics kept writing as if they were not seeing movies at home. I felt during the pandemic that critics should have been more honest about how they were seeing movies, and I tried to do that. The material conditions under which you see the film are part of the film. To sit at home and pretend you’re seeing it at the Ziegfeld isn’t right.
Even if it’s a screening room in Midtown that only holds fifteen people, the important things are that it’s properly dark and the screen is bright. The main thing, of course, is that you’re not controlling the film. The film starts and ends without your involvement. The difference at home is that you can stop it. You can write down your brilliant thoughts and transcribe all the dialogue exactly. And that’s not the same as being a film reviewer. I taught a class this fall, and I had twenty-five students. I made them all go to one movie a week in a movie theater and take notes and see one movie at home, an older film. They could choose to write about either film, but almost all of them each week chose to write about the film they saw in the theater.
LORENTZEN: Why do you think that was?
HAMRAH: It’s more cinematic, and it’s more writerly, somehow, to sit there in the dark and take notes, even if your notes are useless or you can’t read them. Some of them had Ph.D.s in film studies, but they had never done that before, they told me. They said they’d never been in a screening where they had to sit there and take notes, even though they’d been through grad school in film studies.
LORENTZEN: What role do the notes you take in the theater play in your writing?
HAMRAH: If I don’t transcribe my notes within a couple of days, I often can’t read them anymore. I have to do it quickly. And I want to take as few notes as possible, too. I’m watching a movie, so I want to be looking at the screen. It’s dark, and I don’t want to be looking at my notebook. I find the notes useful because just the act of writing down my observations while the film is running causes me already to start editing things. Sometimes I’ll think something is insightful or funny and I’ll write it down in the screening. Then I’ll realize that it’s not that good a thought, and I think that’s valuable. I think people do that less when they’re writing from watching things on TV or the computer. They’re not self-editing because they know they can go back to it.
LORENTZEN: Across all three of your books you seem to be engaged in a kind of agon with the baby boomer generation, broadly defined. They are avatars of the glories of New Hollywood, but also a generation that has turned against cinema.
HAMRAH: It depends whether you’re speaking about film critics, the audience, or filmmakers. The baby boomer audience has become completely degenerate. All they want to do is stay home and watch things on TV and then brag about how they do that. There’s this real edge to their feelings about this. They want the cinema to die, and they want it to die with them, and they want to force everyone else at gunpoint to admit that it’s over and that staying home and watching television is as good as going to the movies. It’s not true, and there’s people all over the world, younger people who want to go see things in movie theaters. Letterboxd is a testament to this. I think young people are well aware of the misery of watching things on their computers all the time.
LORENTZEN: Why did this turn against the theater experience happen now?
HAMRAH: I’m not really sure why this developed, except there’s that quotation from Éric Rohmer that I put at the beginning of my book in which he admits, well, I’m old now, so I don’t like to go out as much. And it’s hard for him to find the seat he wants, and it’s inconvenient, and he just prefers staying at home.
LORENTZEN: But that’s different from saying, If I can’t do it, nobody else should be able to either for—
HAMRAH: The rest of time, right? But Rohmer is not saying that. It’s just the American baby boomers who are saying that if I can’t do it, if I don’t want to do it, everyone should do exactly as I do, and we should admit that that’s the way to do it, because that’s the way that makes the most money, according to us. And I feel like a lot of baby boomer film critics feel the same way. They’re awaiting the death of cinema, but you know, not optimistically, in the sense that Godard meant when he said that.
LORENTZEN: How did he mean it?
HAMRAH: When Godard said I await the end of cinema with optimism, he was referring to the death of the capitalist studio system and the liberation of a true and free cinema.
LORENTZEN: Is that possible? And by what technological means?
HAMRAH: Well, the studio system, the way it’s behaving now, is going to collapse. It will become television. Paramount just wants to make IP movies. Warner Brothers is going to be absorbed by Netflix. It’ll just be streaming television.
LORENTZEN: But without the studios’ money, how are the movies going to get made? Crowdsourcing? Independent financiers?
HAMRAH: Independent financiers have traditionally been the saviors of the cinema. And it’s getting harder for filmmakers to get financed, because there’s this idea that you have to go to the studios for everything, to the streamers for everything. People are going to be disabused of that notion very soon.
LORENTZEN: The idea that a film will be financed independently with the hope that it will be picked up by Netflix or whoever?
HAMRAH: Or distributed by a studio.
LORENTZEN: Are there studios that still function in the old way?
HAMRAH: Some do like A24 or Neon or Mubi, but some of them are starting to become enamored of AI now.
LORENTZEN: Simply as a means of cost cutting?
HAMRAH: Because of cost cutting and labor saving, yeah, but also because it’s just the zeitgeist, and charlatan businesspeople approach them and convince them: this is the thing to do, which is what’s happening at A24 as we saw in that very fawning New Yorker article about it a couple of months ago.
LORENTZEN: How are they using AI?
HAMRAH: They don’t want to say how they’re using it. But I think a lot of it’s going to be script development, script reading. They don’t want to pay people to read the scripts. They want an AI to read the scripts. I’m not sure how they’ll use it in production, but they’ll do something to cut costs. But that mostly applies to the kinds of films the big studios still make, which are animated family fare with voice actors. That all can be automated completely. It’s clear that the studios want to eliminate employees. It’s their main goal. They want to automate everything, and they expect the audience will like this stuff. I don’t think they will, but the audience is very used to poor-quality product now from Hollywood.
LORENTZEN: We sometimes talk about the audience for film as if it’s a monolith, but obviously there have always been many possible audiences. If one audience stays home, which ones go to the theater?
HAMRAH: It’s hard to know who the audience is for theaters now, because the movie theaters basically aren’t in the right places where the audience is.
LORENTZEN: That would be cities, right?
HAMRAH: Cities and neighborhoods where there’s younger people. Not Midtown, not tourist areas. Some places still seem very vibrant for film-going—like the West Village. When you get to the Midtown film societies, Lincoln Center and MoMA, there may be people there, but it’s inconvenient for the main audience of cinephiles. The people that live near there are very old: the crinklers, the laughers, the coughers.
LORENTZEN: For the past two years, you’ve been living in upstate New York near the Canadian border. Are you going to multiplexes up there?
HAMRAH: No, there’s no multiplexes there. I mean, they’re technically multiplexes because they have multiple screens.
LORENTZEN: Are they like derelict mall theaters?
HAMRAH: No, there’s a small local chain. It’s not owned by Regal or AMC or Cinemark. It’s owned by some guy in the county, and he has three movie theaters and a drive-in. The theaters each have five or so screens. And this one guy owns them. I don’t know his name. I think it’s Jerry. [His name is Jeff Szot. —Ed.]
LORENTZEN: And does he do it for the love of cinema or just because it’s a reliable cash cow?
HAMRAH: His chain is called J.S. Cinemas. J.S. Cinemas has a great website, very web 1.0. I don’t really know his motivation. He’s a showman. This is what he does. And one of the theaters has been in continuous operation since 1921. The Canton American, which was a one screen at one time—that’s a five-screen now. And there’s a newer one that’s in a strip mall, yeah, that has eight screens.
LORENTZEN: What sorts of movies are shown there?
HAMRAH: Commercial Hollywood movies with the occasional right-wing Angel Studios film. And they’ll show an A24 movie once in a while, or a Neon movie. They showed The Substance, which was from Mubi. I saw the Reagan movie up there. People go to the movies up there. I’m always surprised by how crowded certain things are. Furiosa was crowded both times I saw it, and that supposedly did no business. So it’s very strange. There was one day when there was a huge long line for Alien: Romulus. The most recent Jurassic Park movie, which I saw and which was bad, that brought people out like crazy, for some reason.
LORENTZEN: It had Scarlett Johansson, right? Any of the old stars?
HAMRAH: No, not even any cameos. It was a terrible film. The special effects look worse than they did in the ’90s. It was awful. I don’t know who thinks this looks good. I saw Tár there when I first moved up there. There’s a Monday night series called Cinema 10, where they show for one night only movies that wouldn’t normally play there.
LORENTZEN: How expensive are these tickets?
HAMRAH: $10 shows, $7 matinees. And you know, the projection standards are not as high as New York City. The screens are too dark. I think they have bad bulbs, I’m not sure. I think they have the wrong lenses on. I think they have 3D lenses on films that are not 3D films. But you can’t really complain to anyone or point it out. You put up with it. The guy selling tickets presses a button and the films run. I’ve been here in New York City for a few weeks now. I’ve been to a lot of movies. The screen at the Walter Reed is so beautiful compared to the poor projection up there. I was at Film Forum the other day, and I saw this movie called Who Killed Santa Claus?, a French film from 1941. It’s a new release by the Film Desk, Jacob Perlin’s company. I think he put it out as kind of a Christmas special. And, you know, the problem with the film is that Santa Claus doesn’t get killed until the third act. If you’re gonna call it Who Killed Santa Claus?, I think you’ve got to kill Santa Claus in the first act. But it was an enjoyable thing to see. I mean, anything’s enjoyable to see in New York City. You don’t know how good you got it. The quality of the projection is just so high.
LORENTZEN: What’s the difference between the time of your first collection and the time of this one?
HAMRAH: The studio bosses have more control over the individual movies than they have ever had in the history of cinema, and that’s because of digital technology. And that’s only worsened. Theatrical exhibition is declining because a lot of theaters are closing in the rest of the country, even as more open in big cities. Fewer films are being made at that level of production. Covid really changed people’s habits, changed some people’s habits permanently. The way the big films look has changed because of developments in digital technology. The average Hollywood film looks bad. They are optimized for streaming on computer screens, and they look like mud and they’re colorless.
LORENTZEN: What’s the nature of the visual decline?
HAMRAH: The cinematography is flat, uninvolving. They shoot so much coverage that the film can be assembled by anyone and messed with by producers, so the producers have more control over how it’s cut. When you see a properly composed film, now it’s kind of shocking. The values and aesthetics of television, they’re completely taking over: fast shooting, big heads, uninteresting angles, large groups in the middle of the frame just standing there, just getting information across, just plot points in the dialogue. The idea is that this is the second screen, that you’ll be doing something else while you’re watching a movie, not just watching a movie. Everyone always gives the example of folding laundry. They’re texting or they’re doom-scrolling. Doom-scrolling or folding laundry—those are the two activities of Americans now with a movie on at home.
LORENTZEN: This is a function that used to be performed by the radio.
HAMRAH: Radio with pictures, as they used to say. Pictures you don’t have to look at. But the actual radio is more interesting than that stuff. Where I live, there’s North Country Public Radio, which I listen to every morning. There’s a lot of sports broadcasts from Ottawa. You can listen to curling on the radio or the Ottawa Senators NHL team. There’s CBC in English or French. You can listen to a lot of French Canadian pop music, stuff that you’ll never hear outside of that market. All that is better than Netflix. It’s the kind of place where the radio makes more sense. In the middle of nowhere, the radio still has a function. It’s the suburban nature of Americans who are just driving everywhere that made radio pointless once Sirius XM was built into everyone’s cars. My car doesn’t have that. All it has is a tape deck and an AM/FM radio.
LORENTZEN: You’ve said there are three things you need to be a film critic: taste, knowledge, and prose style. How are those elements holding up in contemporary American film criticism?
HAMRAH: Letterboxd has made people much more aware of all different kinds of films. People see them and watch them obsessively, as cinephiles do when they’re in their late teens, twenties, early thirties. So the knowledge is increasing, and then taste kind of follows that. But the big problem is prose style because the main venues for writing are social media or like social media—Substack, for instance—and social media does not have standards. It doesn’t discipline writers to get better. And when people write long things on Letterboxd, I wonder what they are doing. Writing a two-thousand-word piece for free on Letterboxd, I don’t know why anyone would do that. Ever since the late ’90s, the lie has been that writing on social media will get you a professional gig. So if you just keep doing that, you’ll become a writer who’s getting paid. That’s not really true, although there are a few people who have done that and led everyone else astray. The only way to do it is writing for magazines, and there’s a lot of new film magazines cropping up. A great example is Narrow Margin. These magazines are starting to go back to print now, which I think is good, and which will improve people’s prose and their ability to think through films and to be original, too, because the biggest problem is unoriginality in terms of what people like and how they write about it. The herd mentality is promoted especially by Rotten Tomatoes. And especially by the trades.
LORENTZEN: What are the characteristics of the Penske publications—Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, and so on?
HAMRAH: Fawning, slavish devotion to the studios and marginalization of reviewing and criticism in favor of puff pieces about actors, which was not always the province of the trades. The trades used to be more for the industry, but in this century they started becoming more public-facing. So they do all these actors’ roundtables now. Or short videos of two celebrities talking to each other, and usually it’s boring. Unless it’s Jennifer Lawrence, it’s just deadly, you know? They decided they should become more like Entertainment Weekly.
LORENTZEN: What are the damaging legacies of Entertainment Weekly?
HAMRAH: Consumer guide thinking. Herd mentality. A certain kind of smugness. Slavish interest in famous people in the industry. The hope that someday you’ll maybe be the Toluca Lake bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal entertainment section, and also writing very big, long, thick biographies about famous people in the film industry. Those are the legacies of Entertainment Weekly, which is not weekly anymore, but it’s still called Entertainment Weekly. Yeah, I don’t know why they still call it that. They insist on Entertainment Weekly.
LORENTZEN: That’s the brand.
HAMRAH: Who cares? Nobody cares.
LORENTZEN: The Atlantic got rid of Monthly.
HAMRAH: But what would it be called without Weekly, just Entertainment? That’s not a magazine, it’s a Gang of Four album. So I remember when I really started to dislike Entertainment Weekly as a vehicle for film criticism. It was when I saw a guy I knew had started in zines, and now he was reviewing films for Entertainment Weekly. He gave the Godard film Two or Three Things I Know About Her a B-plus when it came out on VHS. It’s a one-paragraph review of a Godard film from 1967, and it gets a B-plus. That is no way to live.
LORENTZEN: What’s the legacy of the zine era?
HAMRAH: The zine era is so defining for Gen X, and it’s why I think the really good writers in Gen X started doing that when you just wrote for yourself and your friends, and you were edited by your friends, but your friends were not afraid to edit you, because everyone wanted to make what they were doing as good as possible and didn’t care about much else. It promoted individual voices, not a kind of careerist mentality where everyone sounded the same. The distinctive quality of writers of our generation comes from that era. And I think the people whose work is the most interesting or has survived are people who were not brought up through the ranks of what are now called legacy publications. Instead, they did it on their own with editors they trusted.
LORENTZEN: One of my favorite pieces in Algorithm of the Night is your introduction to the first collection of Serge Daney’s film criticism in English. What do the legacies of twentieth-century French and US film criticism have to teach us today?
HAMRAH: Daney was a figure who in a sense did not exist in English but who was also well-known as the final Cahiers boss. He was a planet we in the United States could not quite see but who had an enormous gravitational pull because he was ahead of his time in this interest in all kinds of films, especially post-colonialist cinema, but only one minor book of his had been translated, and in the anglophone world a new generation was coming up that shared his interests and his voraciousness and I think sensed someone like him had to have existed. But he’d died long before they’d heard of him. I think in a way he existed through Jonathan Rosenbaum, and then through the people who translated him on the internet on their blogs because they loved him. That was what the internet was for, really, at its best.
The great mid-century American film critics are still very present for me and occupy a huge space in my mind, though I try not to show it. Not just Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris, and Pauline Kael but also less well-known figures like Robert Warshow, William Pechter, and Robert Sklar. Also James Agee, Molly Haskell (I would like to meet her), and kind of outliers, in a way not film critics, like Jonas Mekas, James Baldwin, Renata Adler, and Susan Sontag. And early David Thomson. I don’t think these people are taught much in cinema studies. It’s better that they aren’t. They should be taught as writers and thinkers-through-films. It’s better to discover them on your own.
Christian Lorentzen is a writer currently living in New York.