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 The Earth Dies Streaming collects the best of A. S. Hamrah's film writing for n+1, The Baffler, Bookforum, Harper's, and other publications. Acerbic, insightful, hilarious, and damning, Hamrah's aphoristic capsule reviews and lucid career retrospectives of filmmakers and critics have taken up the mantle of serious American film criticism pioneered by James Agee, Robert Warshow, and Pauline Kael and carried it into the 21st century. Taken together, these reviews and essays represent some of the best film criticism in the English language. The Earth Dies Streaming showcases a remarkable critical intelligence while offering a cultural history of the cinema of our times.