Always On

Your standard movie review is a strictly formal product. It has a set number of words, presumes the reader’s ignorance of the circumstances of the film’s making, and spells out as much of the plot as possible without — gasp — revealing the ending. Digital publishing, IMDB, and Twitter have made this approach all but untenable, yet it remains the default way of doing business. Only one critic, n+1’s A. S. Hamrah, has developed a convincing alternative.

This fall, the magazine released , an inaugural collection of Hamrah’s indispensable work. Rather than focusing on one or two new releases, his columns take the form of a dozen or so