A.S. Hamrah Q&A notes

Notes from a Q&A with film critic and writer A.S. Hamrah at Letters Bookshop on 2 Mar 2026.

I am jotting these down a day later, and embarrassingly without having actually read any of his works before, so these are not doing his thoughts justice at all. But I thoroughly enjoyed hearing his thoughts and insights, and want to capture some of that here. I also bought a copy of his book The Earth Dies Streaming, which I'm looking forward to sitting down with.

• Monopolization of media - referring to his new book Last Week in End Times Cinema, and recent events with Paramount buying Warner Bros Discovery.
  • Not only is having fewer decision-making voices a bad thing for creativity, but it is also a cultural/political risk, and invites authoritarianism.
  • The oldest film on Netflix is from 1973(??)
    • On a personal note, inspires me to buy more physical copies of films that are meaningful to me
• AI and movie making
  • Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons is being re-done with AI filling in missing scenes. Who wants this, who is the audience for this?
  • Why is A24 creating an AI division?
  • Perhaps can be used to reduce labor costs, but awful for creativity.
• Younger generations and movies
  • Like others, has noticed that younger people largely do not seem to connect with movies as a medium, threatening its future
  • But also notes that the average age on Letterboxd is 20, and there are many young cinephiles
• Working as a projectionist, and using that time to read books.
  • Better to not work like this in the present, and have access to a smartphone.
• Clint Eastwood - Hamrah highly regards his films, as being singularly interesting and distinctive. Underrated experimentalism, for example the dreams/nightmares of Sully, and the casting of The 15:17 to Paris. His politics should not damage assessment of his filmmaking.
• Herschell Gordon Lewis - early gore filmmaker. Casual entertainment for teens in the 70's, but likely impenetrable to undergrads today, and only interesting to graduate students from an academic study lens.
• Films about the War on Terror - good ones largely do not exist, and they are largely superficial and trite. The great baby-boomer directors (Spielberg, Coppola, etc.) made great films about WWII and Vietnam that shaped society's views on those events. But there has been a lack of understanding and processing of the War on Terror, as filmmakers have not been interested in tackling it in the same way. Writing about extensively in the essay Jessica Biel's Hand.
• Reasons for writing
  • Not because he wanted to others to listen to him, or because he realized that others listened to him, but just because he wanted to write, and articulate his thoughts that way.
  • 'So what' editing, avoiding positive blurbs, avoiding plot descriptions, avoiding references to actors/directors/etc.'s past works