The End of Cinema?

Amid cinema’s decline, two new books by A. S. Hamrah resist defeatism.

By Georgie CarrFebruary 15, 2026

• Film

FOR SUSAN SONTAG, cinema declined one decade at a time. The 1890s was the decade of the miracle of invention. In 1900, silent cinema soared. Next came the Golden Age; the big majors ruled the roost. As neorealism followed war, so the 1960s heralded the New Waves. New Hollywood triumphed for the next 10 years. But by 1996, cinema had suffered an “ignominious, irreversible decline,” smashed by the blockbuster and the rise of digital. In two new books—Algorithm of the Night, a collection of film criticism from 2019 to 2025, and Last Week in End Times Cinema, an “almanac of every bad thing that happened in the film industry from March 2024 to March 2025”—A. S. Hamrah quickens the judgment of history. Now cinema decays in months, weeks, days.

Hamrah, a film critic who writes regularly for n+1, Bookforum, and The Baffler, dates the medium’s accelerating decay to the spring of 2020, when American cinema stopped. As movie theaters closed their doors, streaming soared, and one medium came to dominate: the television. By early 2021, Netflix shares spiked 30 percent, and the crisis became an opportunity, as former cinema audiences transfigured overnight into a new single market: subscribers. Subscriptions, so the logic goes, provide a more stable source of revenue, less exposed to the whims of taste and the demands for quality that sink many contemporary blockbusters. So, increasingly, Warner Bros., Fox, and Disney diverted their revenues to streaming. For Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, the concept of “movie theaters, […] the communal experience,” had become “an outmoded idea.” Instead, he called for the release of films in theaters and on streamers simultaneously, slamming shut the vital window that draws viewers from their homes.

But the push for total television reveals a web of contradictions. As Hamrah shows, Disney made $5.5 billion from theatrical revenue in 2024 while its streamer lost $11 billion. In just three months of 2024, Disney+ lost 700,000 subscribers. Fewer films are made in Hollywood now, and more of them are worse: a glut of IP movies, hollow star vehicles, and sequels. In the large cinema complexes of suburban towns, ticket prices climb as management flogs toys and gimmicks to reluctant customers. Generative AI has entered every stage of cinema’s production. Yet at the same time, repertory cinemas are on the rise, while online cinephilia moves in from the margins. And people still seek film criticism where they can find it. As the split between what audiences want and what conglomerates provide widens, the CEOs are planning more TV. In 1988, the French Cahiers du Cinéma critic Serge Daney wrote that films fall from the sky to television. Hamrah would say they land in hell.

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At the moment Sontag thought cinema was dying, one of its finest critics started writing. Growing up in small-town Connecticut, Hamrah watched Stan Brakhage shorts over breakfast before school, beamed in from independent television networks in New York. This was Ronald Reagan’s first term as president, the era of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. (1982), and Back to the Future (1985). But at nearby Wesleyan University, they were screening Douglas Sirk and Lubitsch. Later, in Boston, he worked as an usher, projectionist, and archivist, his sojourning testament to the United States’ uneven cinematic development: its cinephile centers, crumbling multiplexes, and shuttering independents. Arriving in New York after what J. Hoberman terms the “manmade cinematic event” of 9/11, Hamrah would endure eight years as a brand content analyst for reality TV producers. This exposure to media in its dominant mode was a formative experience for him: “Seeing the sausage get made at the C-suite level of television production, and then analyzing the fandom of the sausage, made me realize that every negative thing ever written about TV was true.” In a search for cinema’s emergent forms, Hamrah has watched the lot: Hollywood blockbusters, global art cinema, the forgotten auteurs of the American Left. Today, the journey continues: now living where there are no theaters, he must cross the border into Canada to watch movies like Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada (2024).

These commitments and constraints shape the form and cadence of Hamrah’s style. With no free time to write his first reviews for n+1, he dictated them on the phone to his editors. This, he says, is why each chisel-formed segment is so short, a concision he has maintained in his later writing. Rarely does he start or end where you expect. A typical Hamrah review wrong-foots you, reorienting midway to look askance at its own argument. Thus, he examines the Mission: Impossible franchise as an incisive metacommentary on the film industry, argues that Sean McNamara’s mawkish 2024 Reagan biopic “is the last great epic of heroic Soviet socialist realism,” and demonstrates how the 2025 Oscar nominations exemplify the Kamala Harris “era,” which “exhibited contradictory properties usually associated more with quantum physics than with Hollywood movies: it was both brief and nonexistent.”

But this is not how critics usually write (or speak). Missing are the stock ingredients of the contemporary film review: plot description and the value judgments on whether the movie’s good or bad. Hamrah’s approach to the form resists extraction by publicity departments and review aggregators. Against boosterism, but also wary of the fraught logic of the takedown, he centers instead on a single, surprising thread to unravel the logic of a movie and its making.

Sometimes this reversal happens at the level of the sentence. Eliza Hittman’s social realist Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) is “a serious film about the difficulties young women face in getting an abortion in America, but its asperity is such that it also becomes a documentary on the indignities faced by anyone who has ever had to travel through Penn Station.” What begin as symptomatic readings of a film often resolve into industry analysis. Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman (2020), an overwrought drama about grief that nonetheless ends happily, concludes with a far-out crane shot, which Hamrah reads as a disavowal of its content, by a director too embarrassed to show the scene close-up, in an industry conscious of, but powerless to challenge, its growing artistic inadequacies.

Hamrah’s critical sensibility is indebted to one of his heroes, Manny Farber. In his 1962 essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” Farber skewered the type of “white elephant” films that “overfamiliarize the audience with the picture it’s watching, [that] blow up every situation and character like an affable inner tube with recognizable details and smarmy compassion.” Instead, Farber praised the “termite” movies that, less conscious of their own artfulness, eat away at their own borders, emphasizing an immediate artistic need while moving, grub-like, against the more grandiose affectations of the medium.

Hamrah’s termite prose moves similarly. Indeed, his n+1 reviews chew through their own edges. His method is often to take a group of films from a single year, considering each in turn. Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019) was “something of a masterpiece, with long, loping scenes shot on location in Massachusetts.” But two reviews later, he argues that Marielle Heller’s 2019 documentary A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood “impressed [him] more than the cinematography in Little Women, which edged right up to the line of the too-fancy and pushed right over.” In this way, he lets the two films collide, and one review bleed into another. In which case was he correct? For Hamrah, that’s not the most exciting question criticism asks. Instead, contradiction creates the conditions to examine style across genre. Reading across cinema’s established categorizations—for instance, between art cinema and the blockbuster—highlights continuities between industries, borders, and audiences.

Termite criticism also enables political diagnosis. Hamrah’s review of the “failed exposé,” Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice (2024), examines Donald Trump’s interactions with Roy Cohn, the McCarthyite lawyer. And he is still talking about Cohn three reviews later, in Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: Part I (2024), contrasting resistance to the Red Scare with the enfeebled politics of modern Hollywood by citing Adam McKay’s declaration “that Wicked is so ‘nakedly about radicalization in the face of careerism, fascism, propaganda’ that ‘if America keeps going on the track it is I wouldn’t be surprised to see the movie banned in 3–5 years.’” Critics are often quick to highlight instances of “intertextuality” across the films they watch, wonkishly demonstrating how auteurs mirror and reference their forebears. Hamrah instead highlights the continuities of a Hollywood liberalism that, White elephant–like in its peering grandeur, cannot create the conditions of its next achievement.

In Algorithm of the Night, Hamrah shares an anecdote about an audience member who, after leaving a movie theater in East Germany in 1961 after viewing One, Two, Three, Billy Wilder’s Cold War satire, declared: “What breaks our heart, Billy Wilder finds funny.” Similarly, Hamrah created Last Week in End Times Cinema, which began as a newsletter about bad news in the entertainment industry, “with a certain kind of joy” until the accumulating horrors “began to get to [him].” Structured as a series of brief dispatches, the book chronicles events beginning in March 2024. What starts off grim (the director of Doctor Strange [2016] will remake Night of the Hunter [1955]) soon gets bleaker (Godard’s final film is distributed by an NFT company). As the news bulletins accumulate, their rapid-fire juxtaposition reveals the massive scale of the industry’s debasement: CGI slop; mass redundancies; endless IP sequels; offshoring; spiraling CEO paychecks, theater ticket prices, and subscription fees. For Hamrah, “the selection was the commentary,” a way to twist reality toward a joke, recomposed in dry, lapidary style. Two consecutive entries read:

[March 17, 2024] Civil War director Alex Garland announces he can’t choose sides, can’t tell good from bad

[March 24, 2024] Big-budget Hollywood Cola Wars movie will dramatize 1980s and ’90s Coke & Pepsi market share struggle that captured the imagination of no one

But slowly the humor curdles. Judgment Day, with no good news. There are moments of resistance: AI robots organize a strike; hackers ransom Disney’s servers with demands for “protecting artists’ rights and ensuring fair compensation for their work”; a mumblecore director rents out his art-house VHS tapes, and is subsequently pursued by the City of Chicago for unlicensed distribution. But these efforts are quixotic, incommensurate with the force of AI gleefully ushered forth by Netflix’s Sarandos, Paramount Skydance’s David Ellison, and Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav. Infiltrating every process, AI speeds the pace of Hollywood’s decline. It looks like this:

[April 21, 2024] Trailer debuts for first all-AI movie, Next Stop Paris, a romance for TLC television from producer of Sharknado movies

[September 15, 2024] The amount that Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have spent on AI so far—a combined $52.9 billion—is almost $6 billion more than it would cost to replace all the remaining lead pipes in the US

[November 17, 2024] Wscripted+ is a new AI platform that launched at the end of October, and promises to review screenplays so actual human beings don’t have to. Founder Ellie Jamen says her product’s process is ethical and will “boost female and underrepresented writers”

[December 14, 2024] A Character.ai chatbot slyly suggested that a 17-year-old in Texas murder his parents for limiting his screen time

Just as the hunt for profit through technology imperils cinema’s future, so too is its past at risk. Netflix made the shift from DVD rentals to streaming in 2007, but when, in 2012, it started to produce its own content, it gradually culled old movies from its servers. Thus, Hamrah’s first entry of 2025: “The Sting, from 1973, is now the oldest movie on Netflix, one of only five on the platform made before 1980.” Thus, 1973 is now cinema’s year zero. Its history begins no longer with the shock of the Lumières’ train or the leap to Méliès’s moon, but with the knowing self-regard of Robert Redford.

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Criticism evaporates in this environment. In 1987, the film director Samuel Fuller said that individual critics didn’t matter, that the public only recognized the papers for whom they wrote: “If Vincent Canby got fired from the New York Times today, and he went to a bar and started talking about a movie he’d just seen, nobody there would give a fuck what he thought. They’d probably just tell him to shut up.”

Today, it’s the papers who don’t care. As Hollywood whorls itself into tighter mergers, editors contort the categories of culture, muscling out the writers for a new frontier of video reviews, roundups, recaps, “what to watch” on streaming platforms. Daily film criticism is gone from the Chicago Tribune. The New York Times has moved “beyond the traditional review.” Sure, cinephiles still have the internet. We can all log our watches on Letterboxd. But Letterboxd doesn’t pay, and films shared online can’t replace the feeling of the movie theater. In a wonderful short essay in Algorithm of the Night, Hamrah tells the tale of when MoMA’s cinema closed for renovations in 2002, replaced by “a ratty old stand-alone theater with sluggish air-conditioning,” the Gramercy on East 23rd Street near Lexington Avenue. For 19 good months, its films were back among the city churn, no longer just an archive. A palpable sense of cinema was lost on the return to 11 West 53rd Street.

Under such conditions, how can film and politics relate? One common move that critics make is to home in on political content, writing, for instance, a righteous condemnation of imperialism in the Marvel movies. For Hamrah, this is just a trap, a time-sucking journey to the obvious. Instead, it’s form that matters: the key tension from where great films spring, where cowards lurk, and where Algorithm of the Night’s best writing sits. Worst are the sellouts: films that parse their politics through gimmicks, kicking up dust with avant-garde theatrics or the hokey citation of old media to mask a failure of nerve. Sam Mendes’s 1917 (2019), which digitally stitches together the spectacle of trench warfare to appear as if captured in one long shot, is a film where “form and content meet in perfect harmony: the pointlessness of the film exactly mirrors the pointlessness of World War I.” Similarly, “seeing Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma on a huge screen in 70mm and black-and-white was great, but since the film was shot in digital video in color, the whole thing kind of seemed like an art project.” Under the cover of special effects, the film retreats from the critique it appeared to make of Cuarón’s elite families’ solipsism, to emerge instead like “a Lucrecia Martel film, but a mild one, in which the bourgeoisie aren’t so bad.”

These are cynics cashing in. American Factory (2019), the story of a Fuyao factory in Ohio, produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, is “cinema verité in the service of power, not people, made to win awards.” Damned, too, are films ready-made for plaudits. Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog is “the kind of movie André Bazin called a ‘superwestern,’ which is ‘a western that would be ashamed to be just itself, and looks for some additional interest to justify its existence.’” I love it when Hamrah lambasts “the power-loving, success-worshipping, union-hating” Aaron Sorkin for a film (2020’s The Trial of the Chicago 7) so ponderous and overtold that it “threaten[s] to […] go on for twenty-one weeks like the real trial did in 1969 and 1970.” It is perfectly correct and true to say that Joachim Trier “doesn’t aim high enough, and he still never hits his target.”

Form, then, is where the stakes of cinema emerge. Hamrah’s heroes—among them Orson Welles, David Lynch, Chantal Akerman, and Wilder—are those for whom only the total refusal of artistic compromise can demonstrate both reality and its effects: how things are and how they are made to appear; “the exact point where, if only for a moment, the movies and real life dissolve into each other, before detaching again, as mirror images,” as he characterizes Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997). This confrontation, for Hamrah, is how cinema uncovers the always present force of capital, the ever-functioning crush of violence. Thus, the all-out ferocity of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), a film set in the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20, is both a lens to the United States’ contemporary war in Vietnam and a look forward to ICE’s brutality. It’s why Fort Apache (1948), John Ford’s telling of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, is the “first Iraq War movie.” It is also how John Sayles’s Matewan (1987), about Appalachian miners’ struggle for unionization in 1920—which uses cameras strapped to coal mine railways or a stock-still camera around which workers gather to deliberate—drives home that central, structuring contradiction: “There ain’t but two sides to this world: them that work and them that don’t.”

Embracing contradiction as a style, Hamrah interrogates its function in and between politics and art, the cinema and the world. To what purpose? Only in this way does the present struggle emerge clearly, without nostalgia. Concluding Algorithm of the Night, Hamrah considers a famous Jean-Luc Godard’s quote, “I await the end of cinema with optimism,” summoning the end of corporate moviemaking while agitating for the counter-cinema that will take its place. But between “Last Week” and the “End Times,” there is only the grinding present. Sayles can’t get funding for his movies—he had to publish the last two as novels. Perhaps this counter-cinema is here now, if we could only watch it.