May 25, 2026
Reel Drama, Rotten Feelings
He Lost It at the Movies
A cult movie critic sparks a comment-section meltdown over whether great film writing is dead
TLDR: The article says A.S. Hamrah became notable by refusing boring, formulaic movie reviews and defending a wilder kind of film writing. In the comments, readers turned that into a bigger fight over whether serious criticism is dying — or whether some critics have already checked out.
A serious essay about film critic A.S. Hamrah somehow turned into a full-on community therapy session about the death of movie criticism — and honestly, the commenters came in hot. The article traces how Hamrah built a reputation with weird, sharp, anti-mainstream capsule reviews, basically rejecting the tidy, consumer-friendly style that tells readers what to watch and what score to give it. Instead, he went for attitude, jokes, and strong opinions, with lines so strange they read like stand-up routines dropped into film culture history.
But the real action was in the reaction. One commenter mourned that all the effort of watching and thinking about movies now gets flattened into "a number on Rotten Tomatoes," which hit a nerve fast: that was the big mood of the thread, a mix of nostalgia, frustration, and exhausted love for an art form people think has been reduced to a thumbs-up economy. Another user basically posted their own mini robot-summary of the essay, calling it a "eulogy" for serious criticism — then cheekily begged writers to just put summaries at the top already, which is peak internet-reader energy.
And then came the side-eye. One of the juiciest turns asked whether critics ever just fake it and review films without really paying attention, dragging a beloved reviewer into the mess over Triangle of Sadness. So yes: beneath the elegant talk about criticism’s past was a much messier comment-section drama — grief, snark, and the sneaking suspicion that even critics might be dialing it in.
Key Points
- •A.S. Hamrah gained wider attention in the late 2000s through n+1 with a brief, unconventional form of film criticism that began with the 2008 Oscars column “Oscar Preview.”
- •The article says Hamrah viewed mainstream film criticism after around 1990 as shaped by a simplified “consumer-guide approach,” associated in part with Entertainment Weekly.
- •Hamrah’s criticism is presented as drawing on an earlier tradition of influential film writers, including Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Andrew Sarris, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and J. Hoberman.
- •Manny Farber is identified as the strongest stylistic model for Hamrah, especially Farber’s quick, inventive capsule criticism in outlets such as The Nation and Artforum.
- •The article argues that Hamrah later loosened his earlier resistance to conventional reviewing, citing his more developed critique of Christopher Nolan’s Inception as evidence.