He Lost It at the Movies - The Ideas Letter

He Lost It at the Movies

A solo audience member at a film festival in Gothenburg, Sweden, on January 30, 2021. © Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty

Leo Robson

May 14, 2026 | The Ideas Letter 64

The film critic A.S. Hamrah came to widespread attention in the late 2000s with a new form, a knockabout variant of the capsule reviews familiar to readers of Cahiers du cinéma and Halliwell’s Film Guide. As he explains in “Remember Me on this Computer,” the introduction to his first collection The Earth Dies Streaming, he was asked by Keith Gessen, an editor at the Brooklyn-based magazine n+1, to write a column on the films nominated for the 2008 Oscars. Hamrah, about forty at the time, declined the commission, explaining that he was too busy with his work as a brand analyst. So Gessen proposed that Hamrah just watch the films and share his thoughts over the phone. “Oscar Preview” started with three sentences on driving in Michael Clayton. The entry devoted to the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, read, in its entirety, “Whenever Javier Bardem took out that pressure hose and put it to someone’s head, I kept waiting for his victim to go, ‘Ouch! Stop it! Why are you doing that? That hurts! Cut it out.’”

It was an exercise in negation, an alternative to film reviewing as practiced in the mainstream press. In Hamrah’s account, a process of dumbing-down had begun around 1990, with the arrival of “the consumer-guide approach” to film criticism invented by publications like Entertainment Weekly, which soon infected traditionally serious outlets. His work for n+1 looked for inspiration to the decades before then, an age receptive to film culture, characterized by vigor and integrity—when Pauline Kael wrote several-thousand-word dispatches for the New Yorker; a compelling newspaper reviewer like Roger Ebert could become a TV star; and cosmopolitan cinephiles such as Andrew Sarris, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and J. Hoberman made their names in film magazines and the alternative press. Those critics all published capsule versions of their longer reviews, but the presiding spirit of Hamrah’s round-ups was another figure from that brighter day, the wild and inventive Manny Farber, who wrote for the Nation and Artforum, and offered a model of the quick-fire assessment—as a form in its own right—in his reports from the New York Film Festival and his essay “Clutter,” which covered films from 1967 and 1968.

In an essay written soon after his 2008 Oscars round-up, Hamrah praised Farber for the things he refused to do. A decade later, in “Remember Me on this Computer,” he provided more or less the same list when recalling his own ambitions. Film criticism, he wrote, should not provide publicity quotes, extensive plot synopses, or facts about the past credits of directors and stars. It could be argued that a single line about a cattle prod isn’t a replacement for “boring and repetitive” film criticism but something else entirely: an experiment or jeu d’esprit, a sort of comic prose-poetry. When Farber wrote about China is Near in “Clutter,” he may have identified the director, Marco Bellocchio, only once, misspelling the surname and giving no first name. But he was sure to describe the director’s “talent for getting multiple angles on a locale” and the film’s “puzzling staccato manner.” Hamrah never relinquished his idiosyncratic tone nor surrendered his right to ramble. But by around 2010 he relaxed his strictures on conventional habits, as displayed in this passage on Christopher Nolan’s Inception:

‘Always imagine new places,’ Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) instructs, but Inception refuses to do that. It presents instantly recognizable non-places, swanky hotel bars in world capitals, vistas from James Bond movies with skiing in them, postapocalyptic landscapes from comic books. Suffused with an ahistorical sensibility, this insta-remake of Shutter Island combines the washy metaphysics of Nicolas Roeg films with Where Eagles Dare—a range of unsmiling British unfun. Terrible dialogue fights to the death with bombastic music meant to pound a ‘militarized unconscious’ into further submission, which it does.

Almost twenty years after “Oscar Preview,” Hamrah’s round-up pieces, which have appeared in The Baffler as well as n+1, remain his primary outlet as a reviewer. In the nearly one-thousand pages of The Earth Dies Streaming and its recently published follow-up Algorithm of the Night, only six new films are given standalone treatment. But since the retirement of Jonathan Rosenbaum as the film reviewer at the Chicago Reader—around the time of Hamrah’s first Oscars piece—Hamrah has become the go-to critic for Anglophone cinephiles, along with Richard Brody of the New Yorker.

Like Hamrah, Brody, who is roughly ten years his senior, has talked about the importance of early exposure to the French New Wave, especially Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and both were marked by those directors’...