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Last Week in End Times Cinema (Semiotext
An almanac of every bad thing that happened in the film industry from March 2024 to March 2025.
From A. S. Hamrah, the film critic at n+1 and the author of The Earth Dies 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 is it, all the shiny nothingness of an industry gone astray.
From A. S. Hamrah, the film critic at n+1 and the author of The Earth Dies 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 is it, all the shiny nothingness of an industry gone astray.
- GenresFilm
256 pages, Paperback
Published November 25, 2025
6 people are currently reading
93 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 17, 2025
how i wish every scroll of twitter would go. depressing but very real look at our current state of affairs particularly in the world of media. hamrah is routinely one of the better people i follow on there anyway so that tracks. helpfully references feneon's novels in three lines as a model which i also read in basically one day. artful doomscroll.
January 2, 2026
My review in the Arts Fuse.
https://artsfuse.org/322370/january-s...
January Short Fuses — Materia Critica
January 2, 2026|Leave a Comment
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Books
In the Afterword of his new book, A. S. Hamrah points out that Last Week in End Times Cinema (the second in a month along with The Algorithm of the Night) started out as an email by the same title sent to subscribers and containing weekly items gleaned from his reading of online movie trade publications. He continued the doomscrolling for a year, and the increasingly absurd, horrifying, and surreal items, beginning with “Civil War director Alex Garland announces he can’t choose sides, can’t tell good from bad” on March 17, 2024, and ending with “Animated Sneaks will feature talking footwear” on March 16, 2025, record an industry and a culture in perpetual, self-destructive decline.
On the bright side, some of the benighted projects he mentions have not come to pass, such as a film about the Rock’ Em Sock ’Em robots with Vin Diesel. But a reboot of Anaconda starring Jack Black will grace theaters on Christmas Day, and, most depressingly, Melania, the documentary about the First Lady sycophantically produced by Jeff Bezos and Amazon for $40 million, is scheduled to open on January 30.
Unsurprisingly, Jeff Bezos and Amazon, not to mention Jack Black and Vin Diesel, are among the bêtes noires in Hamrah’s mordant diary. The guilty oligarchs, entrepreneurs, corporations, journalists, and others devouring the film industry range from “[b]izarre, eyebrowless OpenAI CEO Sam Altman” to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, whose picture graces the book’s cover.
These are the people, products, technology, and institutions that have reduced the movies to tiny dreams for tiny minds on tiny screens. A litany of idiocy darkened by tragedies such as the death of Gene Hackman, Hamrah’s book ends with a warning. He notes that industry insiders insist that changing the way things are done is like “turning around a battleship” and that it is much more profitable going after the “low-hanging fruit.” “[Now] is the time to turn the battleship around,” Hamrah tells them. “We are not in an orchard blossoming with ripe fruit. We’re swirling in the Pacific Trash Vortex and the ocean is on fire.”
A.S. Hamrah will be coming to the Porter Square Book Store in Cambridge at 7 p.m. on January 28.
— Peter Keough
https://artsfuse.org/322370/january-s...
January Short Fuses — Materia Critica
January 2, 2026|Leave a Comment
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Books
In the Afterword of his new book, A. S. Hamrah points out that Last Week in End Times Cinema (the second in a month along with The Algorithm of the Night) started out as an email by the same title sent to subscribers and containing weekly items gleaned from his reading of online movie trade publications. He continued the doomscrolling for a year, and the increasingly absurd, horrifying, and surreal items, beginning with “Civil War director Alex Garland announces he can’t choose sides, can’t tell good from bad” on March 17, 2024, and ending with “Animated Sneaks will feature talking footwear” on March 16, 2025, record an industry and a culture in perpetual, self-destructive decline.
On the bright side, some of the benighted projects he mentions have not come to pass, such as a film about the Rock’ Em Sock ’Em robots with Vin Diesel. But a reboot of Anaconda starring Jack Black will grace theaters on Christmas Day, and, most depressingly, Melania, the documentary about the First Lady sycophantically produced by Jeff Bezos and Amazon for $40 million, is scheduled to open on January 30.
Unsurprisingly, Jeff Bezos and Amazon, not to mention Jack Black and Vin Diesel, are among the bêtes noires in Hamrah’s mordant diary. The guilty oligarchs, entrepreneurs, corporations, journalists, and others devouring the film industry range from “[b]izarre, eyebrowless OpenAI CEO Sam Altman” to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, whose picture graces the book’s cover.
These are the people, products, technology, and institutions that have reduced the movies to tiny dreams for tiny minds on tiny screens. A litany of idiocy darkened by tragedies such as the death of Gene Hackman, Hamrah’s book ends with a warning. He notes that industry insiders insist that changing the way things are done is like “turning around a battleship” and that it is much more profitable going after the “low-hanging fruit.” “[Now] is the time to turn the battleship around,” Hamrah tells them. “We are not in an orchard blossoming with ripe fruit. We’re swirling in the Pacific Trash Vortex and the ocean is on fire.”
A.S. Hamrah will be coming to the Porter Square Book Store in Cambridge at 7 p.m. on January 28.
— Peter Keough
December 4, 2025
The best living film critic delivering concentrated doses of our cultural apocalypse. Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines is an admitted (and appropriate) reference point here, an incredible read available through NYRB in an edition translated by the often-brilliant Lucy Sante.
I had the privilege of subscribing to the weekly e-mail Hamrah was sending out throughout this chronicled period and looked forward to it with glee. As someone who often passes by advertisements or lines of copy and walks away grumbling or cry-laughing to myself about the state of the world, it somehow made me feel less alone. Maybe it will for you too. Funny, startling, and singular. An important cultural artifact...whatever that means!
Read on the Semiotext(e) paperback.
I had the privilege of subscribing to the weekly e-mail Hamrah was sending out throughout this chronicled period and looked forward to it with glee. As someone who often passes by advertisements or lines of copy and walks away grumbling or cry-laughing to myself about the state of the world, it somehow made me feel less alone. Maybe it will for you too. Funny, startling, and singular. An important cultural artifact...whatever that means!
Read on the Semiotext(e) paperback.
Read
December 29, 2025Takes some nerve to make cracks about “the Letterboxd-ification of film criticism” in your book of tweets.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews