“I don’t want to be representative”

For the past decade, A.S. Hamrah has been the sharp-tongued, rain-lashed drifter of American movie criticism.

What does an anti-colonial building look like? In Naeem Mohaiemen’s 2017 film Two Meetings and a Funeral, Vijay Prashad stands in the centre of La Coupole d’Alger in the suburbs of Algiers...

Hereditary is really about the power of art-making, and the movie’s artists are all female. Their artwork is craft-based, works that have long been associated with female labor...

The distinction between the “logic of the once-and-for-all” and the “logic of Einmal ist keinmal” points to the larger, definitional distinction between the tragic and comic genres.

On the shores of Midway Island, the juvenile albatross skeletons encircle a stomach’s worth of plastic shards, pen caps, bottle tops, the insidious end to all species’ endocrine systems innocuously named “nurdles.”

Deadpan, unhurried, and sensitive, Aki Kaurismäki’s 2017 film The Other Side of Hope tells the story of a young Syrian immigrant, Khaled.

We were waiting for a film like Black Panther, but Black Panther is not the film we were waiting for.  The first sign of ambiguity is the fact that the movie was enthusiastically received all across the political spectrum...

“Getting lost” in a work of fiction is a conventional expression that speaks to the immersive power of narrative...

One of the most peculiar qualities of Greta Gerwig’s much-acclaimed film Lady Bird is that—especially for a coming-of-age story, or domestic drama, or whatever you call it...

Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop.

Doll horror movies are rarely scary, which is strange given how uncanny many people find dolls themselves. Still, they have become a tired trope. As with clowns, the idea of the doll is at this point scarier than any on-screen reality.

For some students, Night of the Living Dead opened the door to an angle they had not considered: that a film could be political without being “political.”

Lack of redaction—or of any real effort to separate disclosures of public importance from those that might simply put private citizens at risk—continued to be a flashpoint for WikiLeaks...

That Diana and the Amazons speak ‘hundreds’ of languages is believable, given their situation and seeming enlightenment; that English becomes their go-to choice for daily chats off the Greek coast, less so.

In some ways, I feel I shouldn’t go there, so naturally I am drawn like a moth to the flame. I can’t get around race and identity politics, and I shouldn’t. But as deliciously pearly white as I am—and given that it’s ipso facto my “identity”—I have still never...

In a cinema in Hackney, watching the first scene of La La Land, I witnessed a curious thing happen to the audience around me.

Did I ever imagine, during my anxious, closeted childhood, that I’d live long enough to see a movie like “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins’s brilliant, achingly alive new work about black queerness?

I think the main reason for my aversion to the theater is the cinema.