Capsules of Dismay: On A.S. Hamrah’s Anti-Criticism

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In the mid-1990s, when I was in middle school and the film critic A.S. Hamrah was, I presume, about a decade out of college, ABC and FOX ran two seasons of an animated sitcom, The Critic. Jon Lovitz voiced Jay Sherman, a grumpy, pudgy New York movie reviewer and television host, whose catchphrase, after ten-second parodies of the latest Hollywood blockbusters and tearjerkers was, “It stinks!” 

I’m not sure if Hamrah ever saw the show, or what he would’ve made of it if he had. I remember loving it in seventh grade, though I don’t know what I would make of The Critic today, if I ever saw it again, with Lovitz having since gone over to MAGA, his career all but over except for a few cameos in Adam Sandler movies. Still, it was the figure of Jay Sherman that came back to me reading Hamrah’s second book of collected criticism, Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing 2019-2025, a darker, funnier but also at times more awkwardly sincere follow-up to The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing 2002-2018. Except for a few earnest interludes, I heard the Lovitz voice: the nasal comic disdain, the casual mandarin glee. I didn’t realize how much I missed it. 

Of course much has changed since the 1990s, both in Hollywood and in legacy journalism, part of a seismic digital revolution whose specter more or less underwrites Hamrah’s oppositional tone, and which unites the miscellany of his reviews. (Note the wry, buzzwordy titles of both collections and their retro covers: the first like a 1950s B-movie, the second a Def Leppard album.) Back when it aired, The Critic not only mocked a confident if absurd industry busy churning out masterpieces such as Honey I Shrunk the Kids and Scent of a Woman; it also poked fun at a new breed of on-screen pontificator who had emerged to comment on them: Siskel & Ebert, Leonard Maltin, Jeffrey Lyons and Michael Medved. Appearing late at night in dim studios to discuss what was “coming to a theater near you,” the professional televisual critic of the ’90s has gone the way of the Pauline Kaels and Renata Adlers—the fiery columnists of the ’70s—before them, replaced by a new army of trade reporters, industry boosters, and YouTubers in their bedrooms. 

What makes Hamrah both an echo of a bygone age and so unique for our own is that he possesses a true critical persona—Shermanesque, Schopenhauerian—but without the insider perch of his more iconic predecessors. Relying on the Brooklyn-facing eminence of n+1, where he got his start, and other non-legacy outlets, like Bookforum and The Baffler, where much of the writing in Algorithm of the Night first appeared, Hamrah has certainly carved out a niche for himself, but his writing is likely never to appear in the New Yorker or New York Times (which he calls “one of our most anti-cinema and TV-centric publications”). Nor will he show up on NPR or PBS. Hamrah is too weird for that—a lovable crank, like one of those old-guard loyalists you see at Anthology Film Archives or Film Forum, a cinephile who crashed the industry party long after everyone else—the producers, the filmmakers, the self-important journalists with their press badges—was already drunk on the corporate Kool-Aid. 

Hamrah walks a fine line between principled opposition and crankdom. In the collection’s opening essay, he rails against entertainment journalists, Rotten Tomatoes, texting at the movies, Bill Maher, AI, streaming, digital projection, reserved seats, and the endless ads before the trailers even start. The new theater-going experience, he tells us, has been “reconfigured as an excuse to slurp Coke under dim lights.” When he deviates into a more laudatory register he is less convincing, in my view, as when he makes the batshit crazy historical analogy between 2019 and 1939 in film production, as if Uncut Gems and The Irishman were the new Wizard of Oz and Rules of the Game, united in their prelapsarian innocence-on-the-cusp-of-fascism. Most of the time, luckily, Hamrah is not afraid of being perceived as a grouch. “At the height of corporate capitalism,” he writes, “you pay full price for bad movies improperly projected in ugly theaters whose business is selling large sodas at 1,000 percent markup.” Hamrah writes to a tub of over-entertained frogs warming in shitty media bathwater he wants to drop a toaster oven into. “It’s an insult to cinephiles and to film history,” he says of the present. “The moment is crap.” Everything, in other words, stinks. Of course it stinks. 

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I first encountered Hamrah’s brand of mordant critical satire in 2008, when I read his n+1 feature on films about the War on Terror. The cover of the issue announced “Iraq Occupies Hollywood,” and a similar pithy, pessimistic wit ran through the piece like an electric current. So far as I know Hamrah had published little of note before that essay, which allowed for the setup of a lone, essentially unknown man “enlisting” to perform the thankless task of watching hundreds of hours of quasi-political schlock: a form of bathetic self-torture. The tone was diaristic, associative, often hilariously dismissive. A dizzying number of films were picked up and put back down in what would become Hamrah’s signature genre: withering blurb-length “capsule” reviews of inane Hollywood product.

In Costa Mesa, near where my parents live, there is an “alternative” shopping center with tattoo parlors, bohemian vegan restaurants, and an Urban Outfitters that calls itself an “anti-mall.” Hamrah’s reviews are perhaps better understood as “anti-reviews” or “anti-capsules.” In their method (satire) and effect (hilarity) they have more in common with The Onion than the nerdy fandom of The A.V. Club. The brevity goes hand in hand with the mordancy. All the self-serious upper-middlebrow films about the tragedy of 9/11, say, or the PTSD of veterans, made by desperately careerist and sentimental filmmakers yearning for applause at Sundance can be snapped down to size, as if the movies weren’t worth the extra words. “United 93 is an exploitation film in the form of a safety-instruction manual,” Hamrah wrote. In the Valley of Elah “is noteworthy for how sordid and amoral it is, how sordid and dull.” 

The title of Hamrah’s breakout article was “Jessica Biel’s Hand,” an implicit reference to the wounded ex-soldier William Wyler cast in The Best Years of Our Lives. That man, unlike the former star of 7th Heaven, really had his hands taken off in a war, replaced by metal hooks.  Since this original synecdoche, a belief in a more authentic, less shitty time in film history––that the best years of Hollywood’s life exist in the distant past––has been a truism for Hamrah. “The American cinema has been producing bullshit for so long now it’s no longer capable of dealing with a situation like this,” he wrote in 2008––though he could’ve said it yesterday. It’s like the difference between Fallujah and Normandy, or between Sundance sap and the heyday of Wyler, Wilder, Walsh, Hitchcock. 

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Reading the Iraq War piece I remember picturing a young man, overeducated and underemployed, living in Greenpoint maybe, a latter-day Holden Caulfield, for whom movies were to blame for the “phoniness” of everything. When I eventually met Hamrah—a friend and I invited him to Yale, where we were grad students, to speak at a conference on the 1990s—I was surprised to find someone a good twenty years older than I’d imagined. I’m not sure what that says about Hamrah’s voice. Does it possess a juvenile quality, too quickly disillusioned, a bit like Jason Schwartzman in a Wes Anderson movie? Or has he preserved the fresh timbre of the recent graduate, not yet compromised into grim conformity and acceptance? 

The voice, which Hamrah has cultivated, is a bit like Elif Batuman in The Idiot or David Foster Wallace on a cruise ship: cerebral, alienated, bemused, either impressed or disgusted by the strange and stupid way of supposedly ordinary things. Hamrah praises The Equalizer for its keen understanding of Home Depot layout, “as if someone involved had done time in the PVC pipe and lumber aisles.” He muses at the over-involvement in rap fandom attributed to French couple of Anatomy of a Fall. He spends much of his review of BlacKkKlansman, supposedly set in Colorado, noticing the Brooklyn accents of the cops, whose dialog “slips into a version of, ‘Eyyy, I’m John Tuturro’s brother, are we gonna get these Klan scumbags or what?’” 

You read Hamrah to laugh with him, not to agree with him. At their best his reviews bear the same relation to more standard film criticism that SNL’s Weekend Update bears to CNN. The tendency, always latent, is something Hamrah has recently refined in his weekly newsletter, started in 2024, and compiled in Last Week in End Times Cinema, a companion book of sorts to Algorithm of the Night, and published by Semiotext(e). The book consists exclusively of absurd one or two-line bulletins, parodic news flashes from the world of entertainment. Like the opening monologue of a late-night host, the form is, in essence, the joke. Headlines are recast—or simply restated—in the service of a punchline:

Sylvester Stallone given Ruth Bader Ginsburg Award; ceremony canceled on account of that’s stupid

Wealthy eyebrowless OpenAI honcho Sam Altman declares that cinema will become video games, which in turn will become ‘unimaginably great’

The MTV Movie & TV Awards have been canceled for 2024. Speculation as to why includes fear of New York protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, and the larger fear people no longer know that MTV still exists

Northrop Frye famously defined satire as “militant irony.” Whether or not Hamrah’s newsletter serves a particular militant cause remains unclear to me. It sure is funny though.

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In the heyday of the ’90s, Roger Ebert famously dueled with Jonathan Rosenbaum at Cannes over Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry. Reporters argued over Schindler’s List and Natural Born Killers. David Kerr spoke of “The Asian Alternative,” referring to the new waves of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong cinema, then captivating festivals and the cinephilic west. 

What, then, of Hamrah’s individual judgements? Beyond the shittiness of the ecosystem, where does his taste slot out?

Hamrah likes the Safdie Brothers and Martin Scorsese. He liked Titane (his favorite film of 2021) and Parasite (“an excellent movie”) and The Florida Project (“restored my faith in children and movies”). He didn’t like American Factory (“cinema verité in the service of power, not people, made to win awards”); he prefers low-fi poetic documentaries like Iraq in Fragments and Hale County This Morning, This Evening. He likes Ruben Ostlund but doesn’t like Joaquim Trier. (The animus toward Trier seems originary, and possibly personal; Hamrah’s breakout feature in 2008 began with a diss of “that Norwegian movie about Norwegian yuppie writers that everybody liked so much.”) Hamrah confesses he finds the Up series, an institution of 20th century documentary, boring, by which I suppose he means trite or sappy. He seems to prize depressive realism, anti-cathartic plots, solo acts, and iconoclastic provocation. I wonder what he thinks of Lars Von Trier.

Of course, most of what Hamrah sees, and writes about, he doesn’t like. The risk here is twofold. On the one hand his persona risks becoming an act: the comic performance of disgruntlement. As if aware of this, Hamrah has branched out from the grumpy Oscar round-ups to embrace longer, more sympathetic and historical essays, and Algorithm of the Night contains, interspersed with the capsules, extended considerations of auteurs, including Billy Wilder, Sam Peckinpah, and Paul Thomas Anderson (usually in the form of a review of a biography for Bookforum) as well as appreciations of classics such as Matewan and Taste of Cherry (first liner notes for Criterion blu-rays). Here the risk becomes that Hamrah’s signature voice—his cranky spleen—deserts him. It is a paradox he sometimes solves by double negation, as when he trash-talks the haters of Triangle of Sadness or Parasite (“what they’re really allergic to is class-based criticism in works of popular entertainment”), or when he praises the apocalyptic vision of his heroes. In Todd Solondz, perhaps the most misanthropic living American filmmaker, Hamrah finds a kindred spirit—the Rossellini to his Bazin––so that what he says of Solondz becomes a form of rebounded self-portraiture, maybe even self-definition: “His deadpan worldview is one of total dismay at the banality of everyday tragedy, pushed to a point where jokes become terminal.”

In the ’90s, Solondz may have come across as “a little harsh,” his point of view “maybe too peculiar.” But the times have caught up. They’ve proven him right. 

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It is hard to argue with Hamrah’s pessimism. And thanks to it, as well as his outsider status, he has managed to weather the changing of the times—#BLM,  #MeToo, #OscarSoWhite, Trump—far more than his legacy colleagues. 

I am thinking here specifically of a critic I sometimes imagine as Hamrah’s doppelgänger and shadow, maybe even his unspoken nemesis: a staff writer at the New York Times whose nom-de-plume also has initials that begin with an A, and whose last name is Hamrah’s first. And if A.O. Scott is the soft, liberal sun to Hamrah’s splenetic anti-matter then Scott’s trajectory serves as a cautionary tale and implicit validation of Hamrah’s own. Judging by the reviews themselves, the Trump era and concomitant “Great Awokening” appears to have precipitated the professional equivalent of a nervous breakdown for Scott, a form of critical psychosis and rapid political onset syndrome, perhaps best typified in his monomaniacal account of Manchester by the Sea, a film Hamrah, by contrast, had the good sense to recognize as a New American Classic alongside Moonlight. As early as Trump 1.0, Hamrah was able to correctly diagnose a “pseudopolitical subtext” in popular culture “used to mask militarized, fascist tendencies and themes” as well as a “cynical desire to leverage ambiguous, implanted meaning” to mollify or intimidate critical factions. At times Hamrah has had to somewhat awkwardly triangulate himself out of sounding too much like an “anti-woke,” anti-Hollywood, right-winger—in one review of a film, I forget which one, he pointed out that it might have a diverse cast but that doesn’t mean it’s good—but in general, unlike Scott, he has managed to preserve his wits and keep his cool. He may have even warmed a little. 

Most of Hamrah’s longer pieces are relatively forgettable. They lack, or cannot sustain, the snark I have come to love and expect from him. The Safdies and PTA have cast Adam Sandler against type, but doing that with Jon Lovitz—playing him straight in a prestige drama—would likely not work. Next to Hamrah’s trademark negation, his appreciations can come across as bland.

Perhaps the loveliest exception to this typecasting arrived in the only essay in Algorithm of the Night about a female filmmaker. Hamrah’s essay on Agnes Varda, a review of the biography by Carrie Rickey, a female film critic, is not only my favorite (non-comedic) part of the book; it is among the best and most moving pieces of film writing in recent years. At once rigorous and sensitive, the essay manages to stay droll and yet still to care. Maybe Hamrah just needed the right subject. As Varda aged, he points out, surviving both Duras and Akerman, she remained “notably unembittered and aware she was still relevant.” This is high praise from a critic who has turned bitterness into ekphrastic haiku.  

Near the end of the essay, beautifully titled “Agnès All Along,” Hamrah even sneaks some autobiography into the mix, remembering his early years in Boston. In the 1980s—when he was in college and I was in preschool—Hamrah devotedly read Rickey’s columns for the Boston Herald around the same time he was discovering Varda’s films in a French Cinema class. (He doesn’t say, but given the n+1 connection, I’m guessing he went to Harvard.) “I had never seen a Varda film,” Hamrah recalls, “and was immediately hooked by the way Cléo purports to be in real time, and of course by the Paris of the Nouvelle vague and by the silent-film-within-a-film, starring Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard.” The memory leads to a discussion of Varda and Godard—Hamrah says a whole book could be written about their connections—and I suddenly realized that throughout the essay Hamrah had been subtly arguing for the subsumption of Godard’s centrality in the received narrative of film history with Varda’s, imaginatively replacing his spiteful critique with her more humane playfulness. And the presence of the feminine, and the layers of portraiture involved, of two women, an artist and a critic, allowed an aging man to remember his youth while reflecting on a medium known as a time-embalmer, and allowed himself a moment of nostalgia and spitelessness. It made me think of that moment in Casablanca when Rick, the American, asks Renault, the Frenchman, why he thinks he might want to give away the exit visas. “Because,” he says, “my dear Ricky, I suspect under that cynical shell, you are at heart a sentimentalist.”