The End of Cinema?

FOR SUSAN SONTAG, cinema declined one decade at a time. The 1890s was the decade of the miracle of invention. In 1900, silent cinema soared. Next came the Golden Age; the big majors ruled the roost. As neorealism followed war, so the 1960s heralded the New Waves. New Hollywood triumphed for the next 10 years. But by 1996, cinema had suffered an “ignominious, irreversible decline,” smashed by the blockbuster and the rise of digital. In two new books—Algorithm of the Night, a collection of film criticism from 2019 to 2025, and Last Week in End Times Cinema, an “almanac of every bad thing that happened in the film industry from March 2024 to March 2025”—A. S. Hamrah quickens the judgment of history. Now cinema decays in months, weeks, days.