McNally Jackson
A. S. Hamrah and K. Austin Collins in Conversation
On Thursday, December 4, join n+1 and Semiotext(e) at McNally Jackson Seaport for a conversation between n+1 film critic A. S. Hamrah and the film critic K. Austin Collins, who will be discussing Hamrah’s two new books, Algorithm of the Night (n+1 Books) and Last Week in End Times Cinema (Semiotext(e)).
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Event Info
Thursday, December 4
7:00pm
Location
McNally Jackson Seaport
4 Fulton Street
Algorithm of the Night
“A. S. Hamrah’s writing on film is a delight. . . . Like all the best criticism, his writing makes art and life feel less lonely.” –Elif Batuman
“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.
Last Week in End Times Cinema
An almanac of every bad thing that happened in the film industry from March 2024 to March 2025.
From A. S. Hamrah, the film critic at n+1 and the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018, comes this unique archive of unfortunate movie bulletins, compiled for his weekly newsletter, Last Week in End Times Cinema, and presented here in digest form.
These customized batches of misfortune and upheaval record a full year of wrong thinking, bad decisions, and man-made disasters from the world of filmmaking. Set against the backdrop of the crazed push for AI, the wildfires in Los Angeles, and the reelection of Donald Trump, the general disaster of current commercial cinema in the age of streaming platforms, theater closures, and the dead-end reliance on IP franchising becomes apparent. As the Hollywood film industry plunged into near irrelevance, these weekly roundups tracked every passing mistake, every easily avoided blunder, every up-to-the-minute example of unnecessary garbage as it emerged from the content mills of our newly tech-based movie business.
Presented without commentary, footnotes, or links, inspired by Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines and the Coffee News, this compilation lists filmland items in naked form, stripped of any ameliorating showbiz happy talk. As Fred Allen once wrote about Hollywood, beneath all that phony tinsel there is real tinsel. Here it is, all the shiny nothingness of an industry gone astray.
About McNally Jackson Books
Books. Some 65 thousand of them. History. More than 200 years of it. NYC’s beloved McNally Jackson’s Seaport outpost spans two floors of the historic Schermerhorn Row building, built in 1811. Windows overlook the cobblestones and armchairs anchor each room. Browse the shelves. Bring the kids to explore the big children’s section. Chat to the McNally staff and find your next great read.
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