Reading the Stars: On Iconic Actors in the Age of Generative AI

Was there ever a time before we read the stars? From astronomy to astrology, humankind has been turning to heavenly bodies to make meaning for as long as we’ve been in existence. For Melissa Anderson, lead film critic at 4Columns and former senior film critic at the Village Voice, reading the stars has a different, though still crucial, valence. Her celestial bodies don’t inhabit the night sky, but rather the silver screen—and yet, reading them has become as necessary in 2026 as observing the Milky Way was to Galileo in the 1600s.

A self-described “acteurist,” Anderson’s first collected work, The Hunger: Film Writing 2012 – 2024, out from Film Desk at the end of last year, charts a gimlet-eyed attention to the movie star, one of cinema’s sui generis elements. (The term, borrowed from curator and critic Dave Kehr, designates stars as “vehicles of meaning in their movies.”)

Such attention opens onto Anderson’s frisky engagement with the motive force of cinephilia. That is: desire. Anderson never shies away from the pleasure that makes movie-watching a proper love affair. Better yet, she centers a lesbian attraction that renders her tastes and their articulations a splendid archive of queer spectatorship, right up there with Boyd McDonald’s legendary Cruising the Movies, which Anderson cites as “a model critical text” in her collected 2016 review.