“Today, the only critic I can think of is A. S. Hamrah.”
—Jean-Pierre Gorin

“Unerring” (Bookforum), “hilarious” (Dana Spiotta), “our age’s most irreplaceable critic” (Guernica), “a genius” (Kenyon Review), A. S. Hamrah returns with an extraordinary collection of his best film writing for n+1, The Baffler, the New York Review of Books, the Criterion Collection, and other publications. Algorithm of the Night assembles Hamrah’s essays on films and filmmakers and his inimitable, aphoristic reviews—a body of work that, taken together, presents a powerful alternative to a culture mired in publicity and stale convention. A journey through the overlapping dystopias of the Trump years, the Covid years, and the Trump years, Algorithm of the Night attends with remarkable style and precision to a film industry in self-imposed crisis, a chronicle of failures and occasional miracles from AI to The Zone of Interest. Against the tides of ignorance and solipsism, Algorithm of the Night is film criticism as literature and—perhaps—prophecy.

ISBN: 978-1-953813-18-3

“In a delightful succession of short essays coming at film from every direction but the one you next expect, A. S. Hamrah makes the case for serious art in a world content to be mid. There’s a kind of side-eyed solidity to his judgment that one reads, in our fucked-up time, with grateful relief. I would listen to Hamrah analyze anything; it’s a joy to watch him find the weirdest way into the subject and emerge with something that feels like the truth.”
—Kerry Howley

“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. . . . 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. . . . [Hamrah] combines the personal point of view and cultural literacy of James Agee with the historical, contextualizing vision of J. Hoberman.”
—Peter Keough, The Arts Fuse

“No one else chronicles the death rattle of the film industry better than A. S. Hamrah. The most honest, intelligent, and entertaining movie critic working today. I’ve never had more fun reading bad news.”
—Johnny Ryan

“Hamrah’s criticism is laser-focused, unfazed by the soft language used all the time by corporately owned entertainment outlets. He has the unique and so-needed skill of being able to dispense with bullshit entirely. He’s frank, and very funny. . . . [Algorithm of the Night] is full of the brilliant writing that has solidified Hamrah’s status as one of the best film critics working today. I tore through the pages in mere days.”
—Conor Williams, Public Parking

“A deeply satisfying and frequently hilarious collection . . . [Hamrah is] a till-death-do-we-part champion of movie-going, a true cinephile whose unerring and cutting criticism makes the cultural world feel less empty and doomed than it may appear.”
—Barry Hertz, The Globe and Mail

“As a longtime devotee of film criticism, there are few days on the calendar more joyous than the ones where I discover a new piece by A.S. Hamrah in my inbox. . . . Hamrah is one of our sharpest critical voices because he takes the form deeply seriously, is disappointed when films don’t live up to his standards, and greets every movie—be it Oppenheimer or Zola or The Zone of Interest—with a similarly open mind. Hamrah is one of the great describers in contemporary criticism; sometimes a stray phrase is enough to capture an entire movie for posterity.”
—Saul Austerlitz, Ministry of Pop Culture

“Pure nitro!”
—Elizabeth Nelson

Praise for The Earth Dies Streaming

“Hamrah is committed to his ambivalence, conveying it with a mixture of precision and conviction that will remind you how much more there is to be gleaned from a review than whether a movie is ‘good ’ or ‘bad ’ (even if it’s a movie you happen to deem very good or very bad indeed) . . . A political awareness imbues Hamrah’s criticism without weighing it down. He doesn’t succumb to a leaden moralizing because he pays close attention to the medium he’s writing about, alert to what he sees and hears.”
—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

“A. S. Hamrah’s criticism is hilarious, irreverent, full of passionate and ingeniously defended judgments. He can be relied upon to push things to a point of delightful perversity, which is part of what makes his work so fun (truly fun) to read. But he is also up to something subversive and political: his work brilliantly torpedoes the tedious conventions, commodifications, and clichés of the corporate entertainment complex.”
—Dana Spiotta

“Hamrah’s writing on movies—he’s the film critic for n+1—is form-bending, disobedient, saturated with history, and at times deliciously nasty. Neither hatchet man nor pushover, Hamrah makes exacting technical judgments while maintaining both levity and a sense of moral stakes. His book is a totem to the crucial role of scrutiny in the era of the fanboy and the recapper.”
—Christian Lorentzen, New York Best Books of 2018

“Indispensable . . . A procession of ideas that speak with unrivaled immediacy to the cultural moment . . . Operating outside of the model that Hollywood expects and relies upon in its advertising, A. S. Hamrah’s columns stand alone in their ability to evoke what it feels like to go to the movies in the 21st century . . . The Earth Dies Streaming solidifies Hamrah’s place as our age’s most irreplaceable critic.”
—Kyle Paoletta, Guernica

“For the past decade, A.S. Hamrah has been the sharp-tongued, rain-lashed drifter of American movie criticism . . . Invigorating . . . Essential reading.”
—Max Nelson, The Nation

“One of our most unerring critics, A. S. Hamrah is a soothsayer, a sidesplitter, a crank, and a moralist. . . . [He] preserves criticism as a form of resistance, and as a form unto itself.”
—Jennifer Krasinski, Bookforum

“A.S. Hamrah is one of the most incisive film critics working today. His capsule reviews—two to three neat paragraphs—get right to the point, homing in on a particular detail from or angle on a film, and connecting it to larger currents in cinema. He’s pithy, evocative, and mordantly funny—a voice that cuts through the din.”
—The A.V. Club

“The Earth Dies Streaming [is] 433 pages of acute, often brilliant writing. And also often funny as hell.”
—Gerald Peary, The Arts Fuse

“A. S. Hamrah rides into film-crit town like The Man With No Name, delivering rough justice. He tells the truth, mordantly and precisely, and is witty, engaging, and painfully accurate whether he is trashing some Hollywood parade float or salvaging a zero-budget foreign independent nobody else bothered to see. His book manages to be at once chillingly ominous and just optimistic enough for our grim time.”
—Lucy Sante

“An essential compendium of A. S. Hamrah’s film writing.”
—Screen Slate

“The Earth Dies Streaming is a wry catalogue of our cinematic present . . . The essays, which range from capsule reviews of a few paragraphs to elaborate career profiles, are marked by acerbic wit and droll insight. Hamrah’s writing distills grim political realities into commentary that is quick and cutting. Taken together, the collection is an irreverent and addictive index of our cultural present.”
—TANK Magazine

“A. S. Hamrah’s writing on film is a delight. I don’t know anyone else who does roundups like that, where he goes through like ten movies and it always feels cumulative and hilarious and somehow life-affirming, like everyone is unwittingly—some less wittingly than others—working through the same problems facing film-producing civilizations at the moment. Like all the best criticism, The Earth Dies Streaming makes art and life feel less lonely.”
—Elif Batuman

“One of the very best books from this dispiriting year. . . . A. S. Hamrah is great company, a friend. He does what most writers ought to do better. He makes unexpected arguments about cultural texts, in an idiom that is undogmatic and comprehensible, and he changes how we make arguments about our own inmost arks of books and films. . . . Hamrah is a genius.”
—Kenyon Review

“You learn something even when Hamrah is beating up a movie you like . . . Hamrah practices the kind of acid criticism that divines the difference between gold and iron pyrite . . . Today, it’s quite hard to tell where the political spectacle begins and the cinematic spectacle ends. But pull threads as deftly as Hamrah does, and the whole ugly tapestry falls apart.”
—Metro Silicon Valley

“Finally, a collection from A. S. Hamrah, a film critic who qualifies as an auteur— formally creative, convention-busting, and always insightful. Reading Hamrah on movies is almost always better than seeing the actual movies themselves.”
—Astra Taylor

“A. S. Hamrah’s capsule reviews of commercial releases in The Earth Dies Streaming—nobody explores the explosive art of the capsule like Hamrah—are threaded together to form great frescos of roiling discontent: discontent with the state of the cinema, the state of America, the state of things generally. A must-read.”
—Adrian Martin, Film Alert 101

“A. S. Hamrah’s lucid, lively writing is so far removed from the tired conventions and polemics of contemporary film reviewing that he sometimes seems to be forging a genre of his own. His arguments are original and he wears his wide-ranging erudition lightly. The Earth Dies Streaming is a reminder that the best film critics care deeply about cinema but not only about cinema.”
—Dennis Lim

“Renata Adler once described the best film critics as those ‘without reverent or consistent strategies,’ who put movies ‘idiosyncratically alongside things they cared about in other ways.’ A. S. Hamrah does exactly that in every piece in this tonic collection.”
—Melissa Anderson

“The best collection of 21st century film criticism I’ve encountered . . . fresh, politically conscious and funky.” —whatchareading.com

“Like Agee on Film for the coming apocalypse.”
—Peter Keough

A. S. Hamrah is the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018. He is the film critic for n+1 and writes for a number of other publications, including Harper’s, Bookforum, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Fast Company, The Baffler, and the Criterion Collection. He has worked as a movie theater projectionist, a semiotic brand analyst in the television industry, a political pollster, a football cinematographer, and for the film director Raúl Ruiz. He produced the feature-length documentary Bunker, directed by Jenny Perlin, which was the opening night film at the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight in 2022. He lives in New York.