It can be hard for criticism to cohere when it’s perforated by ambivalence. They’re like unstable elements waiting to be pulled into a wishy-washy middle ground. Reading “The Earth Dies Streaming,” a collection of film writing by A. S. Hamrah, you realize it doesn’t have to be this way. He decided to make his negative opinions unusable too, resistant to algorithm-driven cultural curation. A review that begins with “Whit Stillman’s movies are like porn films with the sex scenes cut out” will entice a curious human and confound an aggregation machine.

Source: New York Times December 26, 2018 18:20 UTC