After Hours (1985)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Desperate to escape his mind-numbing routine, uptown Manhattan office worker Paul Hackett ventures downtown for a hookup with a mystery woman.
6 connections found
View:
6 films that influenced After Hours
What critics say influenced After Hours
Had Mel Brooks not used “High Anxiety” as a title, you sense Scorsese would have grabbed it.
Other movies have incorporated The Wizard of Oz into their fabric, notably Woody Allen's Annie Hall , Martin Scorsese's After Hours and David Lynch's Wild at Heart , not to mention the popular book/Broadway play Wicked, which tells the story from the Wicked Witch's perspective.
This becomes an omen for the kind of nightmarish night that awaits him, where his only aim will be to get back home like Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz."
King is better, in my opinion, than Scorsese’s other foray into “dark” comedy, After Hours , although the two films do share a certain sense of indescribable paranoia and uneasiness, not only as thematic elements but also in the process of viewing them.
Dismissed by major critics, “King of Comedy” was a flop at the box-office, motivating Scorsese to choose a smaller, independently made film as his next project, the brilliant “After Hours.”
It signals a brilliant return by director-writer Martin Scorsese ("Taxi Driver"/"The King of Comedy") to making the energetic small scale films that earned him a reputation as a great filmmaker.
Two years after his critically admired but little-seen The King of Comedy, he conceived this brilliantly original yuppie nightmare, in which Griffin Dunne plays the angst-ridden everyman to manic perfection.
It comes after Scorsese's " The King of Comedy ," a film I thought was fascinating but unsuccessful, and continues Scorsese's attempt to combine comedy and satire with unrelenting pressure and a sense of all-pervading paranoia.
These were the days where he was still rough-and-tumble, a few miles off from the neon peculiarities of After Hours and the grimy Americanism of Raging Bull .
"After Hours" is a near-perfect black comedy from an unlikely source: Martin Scorsese, the director who's previously given us such rib-ticklers as "Raging Bull," "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver."
Everybody knows “Taxi Driver”, everybody knows “Goodfellas”, everybody knows “Cape Fear”, but a little known film from legendary director Martin Scorsese that film buffs rarely ever talk about is Scorsese’s vastly under-appreciated 1985 dark comedy “After Hours”.
It signals a brilliant return by director-writer Martin Scorsese ("Taxi Driver"/"The King of Comedy") to making the energetic small scale films that earned him a reputation as a great filmmaker.
It may well be exactly the movie that Scorsese, producer-star Dunne, and young phenom screenwriter Joseph Minion (later charged with plagiarizing much of the script) set out to make, and the movie has never fallen out of favor with a subset of Scorsese fans who prefer his work in this offbeat vein to the grotty operatics of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull or the bloated pageantries of The Aviator and Gangs of New York .
Clouds of steam escape from the pavement, as they did in Scorsese's " Taxi Driver ," suggesting that Hades lurks just below the field of vision.
Advertisement
"After Hours" is a near-perfect black comedy from an unlikely source: Martin Scorsese, the director who's previously given us such rib-ticklers as "Raging Bull," "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver."
It may well be exactly the movie that Scorsese, producer-star Dunne, and young phenom screenwriter Joseph Minion (later charged with plagiarizing much of the script) set out to make, and the movie has never fallen out of favor with a subset of Scorsese fans who prefer his work in this offbeat vein to the grotty operatics of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull or the bloated pageantries of The Aviator and Gangs of New York .
The movie earns its place on the list with his great films: " Mean Streets ," "Taxi Driver" and " Raging Bull ."
It’s more like the midpoint of a walkabout decade in which he dabbled after delivering an all-time great to kick it off (1980’s “Raging Bull”).
Inspired by the stories of friends and his own experiences from stories of growing up in Little Italy around small time mobsters and young toughs and would-be operators, it’s the story of Charlie (Harvey Keitel), a young debt collector for his mobster uncle whose ambitions to rise in the family business are complicated by his friendship with an unpredictable, self-destructive childhood buddy, Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro, in his breakthrough performance), and a secret affair with a cousin (Amy Robinson, who went on to produce Scorsese’s After Hours and many other films) who rejects his culture of Catholic guilt and male machismo.
"After Hours" is a near-perfect black comedy from an unlikely source: Martin Scorsese, the director who's previously given us such rib-ticklers as "Raging Bull," "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver."
The movie earns its place on the list with his great films: " Mean Streets ," "Taxi Driver" and " Raging Bull ."