Last Week in End Times Cinema (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents)

An almanac of every bad thing that happened in the film industry from March 2024 to March 2025.

From A. S. Hamrah, the film critic at n+1 and the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018, comes this unique archive of unfortunate movie bulletins, compiled for his weekly newsletter, Last Week in End Times Cinema, and presented here in digest form. 

These customized batches of misfortune and upheaval record a full year of wrong thinking, bad decisions, and man-made disasters from the world of filmmaking. Set against the backdrop of the crazed push for AI, the wildfires in Los Angeles, and the reelection of Donald Trump, the general disaster of current commercial cinema in the age of streaming platforms, theater closures, and the dead-end reliance on IP franchising becomes apparent. As the Hollywood film industry plunged into near irrelevance, these weekly roundups tracked every passing mistake, every easily avoided blunder, every up-to-the-minute example of unnecessary garbage as it emerged from the content mills of our newly tech-based movie business.

Presented without commentary, footnotes, or links, inspired by Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines and the Coffee News, this compilation lists filmland items in naked form, stripped of any ameliorating showbiz happy talk. As Fred Allen once wrote about Hollywood, beneath all that phony tinsel there is real tinsel. Here it is, all the shiny nothingness of an industry gone astray.

A. S. Hamrah is the film critic for n+1 and the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018. He writes for a variety of publications, including The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, Fast Company, and the Criterion Collection. From 2008 to 2016, he worked as a brand and trend analyst for the television industry, and he also produced a documentary feature which was the opening-night film at the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight 2022. In addition, he has worked as a political pollster, a football cinematographer, and for the director Raúl Ruiz. He lives in New York.