Film critic A.S. Hamrah will be the man in front of the screen at least briefly this week, when he introduces two films at the Brattle on Thursday. The night before, he’ll be the star of the show at Porter Square Books, when he and WBUR film critic Sean Burns discuss Hamrah’s recently published collections of his film criticism for n+1 and other places: “Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019–2025” and “Last Week in End Times Cinema.”
Expect Hamrah’s acerbic zingers to fly both evenings. Here’s a possible preview from “All Consuming Horror,” an essay in “Algorithm of the Night” where Hamrah tackles the pandemic, streaming, online shopping and consumerism via George Romero’s metaphor-laden zombie flick “Dawn of the Dead:
In their heyday, malls and cineplexes were often joined together in one place. Cinema was already depicting the mall to eulogize mankind by mocking a form of sub-humanity that had lost itself to buying things it didn’t need. A new era of insomniac zombie shopping online is now here, and with it a new kind of consumerist horror.”
Despite his sharp-tongued reputation, Hamrah told Cambridge Day “Every movie I go to, I want [it] to be good. I don’t go into any movie looking to put it down.” As a critic, what he relishes is something new. “I want to see something that I have not seen before, work by directors who are doing things that are new to the cinema and new to the world.”
His favorite filmmakers include Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, John Cassavettes and Claude Chabrol (his least favorite genre is animation).
Hamrah has deep ties to this area. After growing up in Central Connecticut, he went to Boston University, where he fell in love with film and film criticism after writing about Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend” for a French film class. “I think about that film every day,” he said.
That may explain one of the films he’ll introduce at the Brattle’s “(Some of the) Best of 2025” program, “Nouvelle Vague,” Richard Linklater’s love letter to Godard and the French New Wave. Hamrah says he chose the other, “Vulcanizadora,” an uber indie film about two guys in the woods being peculiar, even though it “is not for the faint of heart,” because “its view of life in America is very stringent and harsh.”
A contemporary eye
Hamrah often reviews through a lens of current events and social issues. In his blurbs about Oscar-nominated films last year, Hamrah contrasted Donald Trump’s psyche now with the version of him depicted in the Ali Abbasi-directed “The Apprentice,” and empathetically brought in the declining condition of Pope Francis in his wrap of the papal election drama “Conclave.”
“As films come out, there’s a front line to reviewing them. And that’s what film reviewers are supposed to be doing,” Hamrah told Cambridge Day. “So, I try to respond to the social reality in which films appear in their time.”
It’s also no surprise that one of his picks was made far outside of the studio structure. “Hollywood cinema is not “the” cinema. It’s a kind of cinema,” Hamrah said. “The cinema exists without Hollywood, and parallel to it. Hollywood filmmaking is not the be-all and end-all of cinema.”
The Brattle is also a homecoming of sorts for him, since he worked as a projectionist there for seven years, while contributing to the Boston Phoenix and Boston Globe’s Ideas section. Some of those older pieces appear in “The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018.”
“Algorithm of the Night” — named for the song “Rhythm of the Night,” which caps the Claire Denis film, “Beau Travail” — collects his essays and reviews since the first volume.
“End Times Cinema” was called “a doom scroll of cultural decay,” by the Los Angeles Times. The book distills the similarly titled Instagram feed-cum-newsletter Hamrah cooked up post-pandemic. He was inspired in part by Félix Fénéon’s 1906 news-as-entertainment satire, “Novels in Three Lines,” compiling foreboding news blurbs about the film industry:
First Lady Melania Trump is selling $10 million dollar sponsorships for the documentary about her life that Amazon already bought for $40 million
— $28 million of that $40 million was a fee Melania had already been paid
— The sponsorships are being offered to CEOs, whose names will be included in the credits should they cough up
VOX LUX director Brady Corbet says he has made $0 on THE BRUTALIST, and that other Oscar-nominated directors this year can’t pay their rent.
(Coincidentally, that Melania documentary opens this weekend.)
Hamrah is a well-regarded critic and a member of the National Society of Film Critics, but also something of an anachronism. “He’s succeeding in a way seemingly impossible these post-[Pauline] Kael, post-[Roger] Ebert days, becoming celebrated and even slightly famous as a print film critic,” said Gerald Peary, Boston film critic and former Harvard Film Archive curator.
Hamrah is pessimistic about others following his path. “It’s deplorable, the way that film criticism has been marginalized,” he said. “There’s no places to publish anymore. Arts editors in America have abandoned the cinema in favor of television and no longer understand the difference between television and cinema.”
Hamrah will be signing copies of both “Algorithm of the Night” and “End Times Cinema” at Porter Square Books Wednesday and the Brattle screenings Thursday.
This story was updated to note that “All Consuming Horror” is an essay in “Algorithm of the Night.”
A stronger
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