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Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019–2025
- GenresFilmNonfiction
528 pages, Paperback
Published December 2, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 28, 2026
A.S. Hamrah first got on my bad side when he wrote a sarcastic obituary for Peter Bogdanovich. He described him as “a good director and a bad husband.” I had just enjoined Peter to work on a nano-budget film of mine and got to know him a little, and found him an unusually gentle and unpretentious man—not like the guy about whom Billy Wilder said “champagne corks were popping all over Beverly Hills” when Peter’s AT LONG LAST LOVE titanically flopped.
While Hamrah has movie erudition and an aspiration toward real literary style in a way that evokes Richard Brody, Jonathan Rosenbaum and, occasionally, even Manny Farber, he has that cultural follow-the-pack thing that distinguishes the winners in the current non-profession of film criticism. So for instance, while reviewing Adam Nayman’s big book on Paul Thomas Anderson, he makes sure to re-air Fiona Apple’s then-recent claim that PTA threw her backpack out a car window and (I hadn’t heard this one) slammed a chair against a wall. There was a time very recently where, if you didn’t bring such stuff up, you might be accused on Twitter of supporting art monsters.
And Twittery Hamrah is, unable to contain the impulse to make some wocka-wocka joke about every 240 characters. He also capitalizes Black, refers with no comic irony to “toxic masculinity,” and praises classic films largely insofar as they are subversions of capitalism, or some other soon to be felled evil. Though he apparently was a “semiotic consultant” to various brands, he appears never to have met a rich person, and pretends to want to boil them in a pot as if he were giving a down-low shout out to Zohran Mamdani.
Is Hamrah the best we’ve got right now? Well, I wish Dave Kehr would put down his film-restorative toolkit at MOMA and say a few words. Brody is leading a renegade mission deep into Wokeistan and Rosenbaum I don’t see much. I feel Amy Taubin is gone with the wind too. Two pieces in here that wreath Hamrah in glory: One is a book review of Barry Sonnenfeld’s autobiography that made me screech with laughter in the back of a taxi several times; the other a summation of my grandfather Billy Wilder, with the effects of Billy’s collisions with the Nazi Party made into a very plausible influence on Billy’s “you’ve got to take the bitter with the sour” work.
While Hamrah has movie erudition and an aspiration toward real literary style in a way that evokes Richard Brody, Jonathan Rosenbaum and, occasionally, even Manny Farber, he has that cultural follow-the-pack thing that distinguishes the winners in the current non-profession of film criticism. So for instance, while reviewing Adam Nayman’s big book on Paul Thomas Anderson, he makes sure to re-air Fiona Apple’s then-recent claim that PTA threw her backpack out a car window and (I hadn’t heard this one) slammed a chair against a wall. There was a time very recently where, if you didn’t bring such stuff up, you might be accused on Twitter of supporting art monsters.
And Twittery Hamrah is, unable to contain the impulse to make some wocka-wocka joke about every 240 characters. He also capitalizes Black, refers with no comic irony to “toxic masculinity,” and praises classic films largely insofar as they are subversions of capitalism, or some other soon to be felled evil. Though he apparently was a “semiotic consultant” to various brands, he appears never to have met a rich person, and pretends to want to boil them in a pot as if he were giving a down-low shout out to Zohran Mamdani.
Is Hamrah the best we’ve got right now? Well, I wish Dave Kehr would put down his film-restorative toolkit at MOMA and say a few words. Brody is leading a renegade mission deep into Wokeistan and Rosenbaum I don’t see much. I feel Amy Taubin is gone with the wind too. Two pieces in here that wreath Hamrah in glory: One is a book review of Barry Sonnenfeld’s autobiography that made me screech with laughter in the back of a taxi several times; the other a summation of my grandfather Billy Wilder, with the effects of Billy’s collisions with the Nazi Party made into a very plausible influence on Billy’s “you’ve got to take the bitter with the sour” work.
December 31, 2025
Hamrah’s two 2025 releases are an embarrassment of riches for a particular type of fan of film writing and criticism. ASH gives films a fair shake and then has thoughts about them—deep, wide, and digressive thoughts. He’s got a big brain and can really write. He is deeply funny, often dryly so, and doesn’t show an ounce of interest in remotely commercial interests—ie, “selling” a film or contributing to any kind of popular cultural narrative-building.
With nearly 1000 collected pages of his writing made available this year, it somehow still isn’t enough. He’s an increasingly rare talent with criticism that is intellectually nourishing, a reminder of what could be only if.
Read on paperback published by the consistently great n+1.
With nearly 1000 collected pages of his writing made available this year, it somehow still isn’t enough. He’s an increasingly rare talent with criticism that is intellectually nourishing, a reminder of what could be only if.
Read on paperback published by the consistently great n+1.
December 13, 2025
My review in the Arts Fuse
Book Review: The “Night” Movies of Film Critic A.S. Hamrah
December 9, 2025|2 Comments
By Peter Keough
Once again, critic A.S. Hamrah sheds perceptive light on our cinematic malaise.
The Algorithm of the Night: Film Criticism 2019-2025 by A.S. Hamrah. n + 1. 554 pages. $23
If film criticism – and film itself – survive the ongoing cultural, political, economic, and technological onslaughts they face, it will be due in part to writers like A. S. Hamrah. His latest collection (there are two, in fact; I have not yet read Last Week in End Times Cinema, but I am sure that it will also be the perfect holiday gift for the dystopic cinephile on your list) picks up where his previous book The Earth Dies Streaming left off, unleashing his savage indignation on today’s fatuous, lazy critical conversations and the vapid studio fodder that sustains it.
Not that it is all negativity. This inexhaustibly illuminating and entertaining assortment of reviews, essays, mordant Oscar roundups, and freewheeling, sui generis bagatelles first seen in such publications as n+1 (for which he is the film critic), The Baffler, the New York Review of Books, and the Criterion Collection is filled with numerous laudatory appreciations of films old and new — all of which you should watch or watch again. I was impressed with his eloquent, insightful praise for Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace (2018), his shrewd analysis of Abbas Kiarostami’s masterpiece A Taste of Cherry (1997) and its mixed critical reaction, and his reassessment of John Sayles’s neglected epic of class warfare Matewan (1987), among many others.
Also not to be missed are Hamrah’s absurdist ventures into his personal life, many in theaters (or not in theaters, as when Covid shut them down in 2020), such as the time he observed a menacing attendee at a screening of 2010’s Joker. “It would be best to see [Joker] in a theater with a potential psychopath for that added thrill of maybe not surviving it,” he concludes. One strikingly admirable characteristic of Hamrah’s criticism is that he consciously avoids writing anything that could be manipulated by a studio into a banal blurb. You will find no “White knuckle thrill ride” or “Your heart will melt” or “A monumental cinematic experience” here.
The book does boast a bounty of blurbable bits, but they are not the kind that any publicist will put in an ad. These are laugh-out-loud takedowns of bad movies, vain filmmakers, and vapid performers. Some of my favorites among these beautiful barbs include his description of The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) as “[S]horter than Wakanda Forever by a whopping 47 minutes but still too long,” his dismissal of Jojo Rabbit (2019) as “combining Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson in the worst, cop-out ways,” and his exasperated take on Edward Berger’s 2022 remake of All Quiet on the Western Front (“What happened to the German cinema?”).
Film critic A. S. Hamrah — another inexhaustibly illuminating and entertaining assortment of writings on film. Photo: n+1 benefit.
He also displays the rare critical ability to reassess a director and give him his due. In his review of Berger’s 2024 Conclave, he admits that “Berger directs [it] like he is a totally different filmmaker than the one who made the 2022 version All Quiet on the Western Front. Unlike that film, this one is highly burnished and tightly wound.” (Watch out – close to blurb material there!)
The book ends with an apotheosis of the listicle called “Movie Stars in Bathtubs: 48 Movies and Two Incidents” in which Hamrah summarizes nine decades of cinema. It ranges from Louis Feuillade’s 1916 silent crime serial Les Vampires (“‘It is in Les Vampires that one must look for the great reality of our century’ wrote the surrealists Aragon and Breton”) to Brian De Palma’s 2002 neo-noir Femme Fatale (“There is a picture book called Movie Stars in Bathtubs, but there aren’t enough movie stars in bathtubs. De Palma’s Femme Fatale, which stars Rebecca Romijn, does much to correct that.”)
Around the volume’s midpoint, Hamrah includes one of the two “incidents” of the title. In “1951: The first issue of Cahiers du Cinema” he celebrates the astonishing cadre of cinephiles, many of whom are depicted in Richard Linklater’s recent film Nouvelle Vague, who put out the publication that reinvented an art form. “Unlike critics today,” Hamrah points out, “these writers did not complain that they were powerless. They defended the movies they loved and excoriated the ones they hated. For them film criticism was a confrontation, its goal to change how films were viewed and how they were made.” It’s a tradition that Hamrah, who combines the personal point of view and cultural literacy of James Agee with the historical, contextualizing vision of J. Hoberman, triumphantly embraces.
Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, including Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2013) and For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
Book Review: The “Night” Movies of Film Critic A.S. Hamrah
December 9, 2025|2 Comments
By Peter Keough
Once again, critic A.S. Hamrah sheds perceptive light on our cinematic malaise.
The Algorithm of the Night: Film Criticism 2019-2025 by A.S. Hamrah. n + 1. 554 pages. $23
If film criticism – and film itself – survive the ongoing cultural, political, economic, and technological onslaughts they face, it will be due in part to writers like A. S. Hamrah. His latest collection (there are two, in fact; I have not yet read Last Week in End Times Cinema, but I am sure that it will also be the perfect holiday gift for the dystopic cinephile on your list) picks up where his previous book The Earth Dies Streaming left off, unleashing his savage indignation on today’s fatuous, lazy critical conversations and the vapid studio fodder that sustains it.
Not that it is all negativity. This inexhaustibly illuminating and entertaining assortment of reviews, essays, mordant Oscar roundups, and freewheeling, sui generis bagatelles first seen in such publications as n+1 (for which he is the film critic), The Baffler, the New York Review of Books, and the Criterion Collection is filled with numerous laudatory appreciations of films old and new — all of which you should watch or watch again. I was impressed with his eloquent, insightful praise for Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace (2018), his shrewd analysis of Abbas Kiarostami’s masterpiece A Taste of Cherry (1997) and its mixed critical reaction, and his reassessment of John Sayles’s neglected epic of class warfare Matewan (1987), among many others.
Also not to be missed are Hamrah’s absurdist ventures into his personal life, many in theaters (or not in theaters, as when Covid shut them down in 2020), such as the time he observed a menacing attendee at a screening of 2010’s Joker. “It would be best to see [Joker] in a theater with a potential psychopath for that added thrill of maybe not surviving it,” he concludes. One strikingly admirable characteristic of Hamrah’s criticism is that he consciously avoids writing anything that could be manipulated by a studio into a banal blurb. You will find no “White knuckle thrill ride” or “Your heart will melt” or “A monumental cinematic experience” here.
The book does boast a bounty of blurbable bits, but they are not the kind that any publicist will put in an ad. These are laugh-out-loud takedowns of bad movies, vain filmmakers, and vapid performers. Some of my favorites among these beautiful barbs include his description of The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) as “[S]horter than Wakanda Forever by a whopping 47 minutes but still too long,” his dismissal of Jojo Rabbit (2019) as “combining Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson in the worst, cop-out ways,” and his exasperated take on Edward Berger’s 2022 remake of All Quiet on the Western Front (“What happened to the German cinema?”).
Film critic A. S. Hamrah — another inexhaustibly illuminating and entertaining assortment of writings on film. Photo: n+1 benefit.
He also displays the rare critical ability to reassess a director and give him his due. In his review of Berger’s 2024 Conclave, he admits that “Berger directs [it] like he is a totally different filmmaker than the one who made the 2022 version All Quiet on the Western Front. Unlike that film, this one is highly burnished and tightly wound.” (Watch out – close to blurb material there!)
The book ends with an apotheosis of the listicle called “Movie Stars in Bathtubs: 48 Movies and Two Incidents” in which Hamrah summarizes nine decades of cinema. It ranges from Louis Feuillade’s 1916 silent crime serial Les Vampires (“‘It is in Les Vampires that one must look for the great reality of our century’ wrote the surrealists Aragon and Breton”) to Brian De Palma’s 2002 neo-noir Femme Fatale (“There is a picture book called Movie Stars in Bathtubs, but there aren’t enough movie stars in bathtubs. De Palma’s Femme Fatale, which stars Rebecca Romijn, does much to correct that.”)
Around the volume’s midpoint, Hamrah includes one of the two “incidents” of the title. In “1951: The first issue of Cahiers du Cinema” he celebrates the astonishing cadre of cinephiles, many of whom are depicted in Richard Linklater’s recent film Nouvelle Vague, who put out the publication that reinvented an art form. “Unlike critics today,” Hamrah points out, “these writers did not complain that they were powerless. They defended the movies they loved and excoriated the ones they hated. For them film criticism was a confrontation, its goal to change how films were viewed and how they were made.” It’s a tradition that Hamrah, who combines the personal point of view and cultural literacy of James Agee with the historical, contextualizing vision of J. Hoberman, triumphantly embraces.
Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, including Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2013) and For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
January 18, 2026
Hamrah's grumpy reviews would be a stimulating read one or two at a time in a magazine, but this huge collection of them is a grueling read that ultimately seems repetitive and pointless.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews