After Hours (1985)

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

A great film, Scorcese is for me the best director of all time but we never hear of this film... We should because it's a film that even if your not a Scorcese fan, you would love it. It's entertaining all along.

One of my tops. Classic NYC and holds up. The story is so something I'll never let go. Under rated.

Has Paul Hackett ever stayed up this late before the fateful night in After Hours? My guess is no. He's a middle-class office worker who has little to attract or like about him; even a lowly temp-worker waffles on about his dreams of giving the unknown intellectuals of New York a space for their voices to be heard, and Paul is drifting out of the conversation, focusing on little inane details in the background and lazily lambasting his own lack of passion. But even he isn't dumb enough to turn down an opportunity with Marcy after a spontaneous meet cute in a cafe. The later he stays out, the more out of his element he becomes, and strange, nightime forces begin to morph his encounters. Ballhaus' cinematography seems to blow everything out of proportion, much like Paul does. The first instance of bad luck is the swept away twenty dollar note out the taxi window, captured in this poetic shot as if it was a leaf blowing in the wind. It then turns up again later in the film, taunting Paul on the chaotic, mindless logic that seems to rule the night. In the diner too, as he tries to recover from a slight mishap in wooing Marcy (after zoom-ins on winks that seem to say that everything is moving along nicely), the camera again magnifies every tiny bit of paranoia that drifts into his mind as he witnesses the blatant flirting with the owner and quickly lets go of her hand in closeup. And then as the night goes on and each obstacle stacks on one after the other, Paul becomes desperate at any kind of escape, and the camera frantically moves towards the telephone that will get him back home, and later practically pounces upon Gail's phone. Much of the humour of After Hours is from the fact that these incidents of bad luck keep hurtling themselves at Paul, unrelenting and without reasonable cause. Minion has embedded his script with an awareness of the usual romantic or erotic conventions. He at first tries to woo the artistic and free-spirited Kiki; it seems the opportunity basically falls into his lap as she requests a massage, already half-naked. He assumes that sensual position behind her, and just as he is past whispering and about to make her move...she starts snoring. Later the same mood is ruined; as he and Marcy return from the diner, he pulls her back to him and leans in for the romantic kiss (a move that has been perfected over decades of romantic movies) until she starts sobbing. And then she is on and off - lighting a candle and hungrily kissing him, and then going into vivid detail about a traumatic rape that would sour any sexual encounter. A simple quest for sex has turned into something unbelievably convoluted and unexplainable. Nothing seems to go right for Paul. As he is continually rejected he glances over to the next apartment and the first thing he sees is a copulating couple. Later he does so again and just happens to witness a murder, to which he sardonically remarks he will somehow be caught in the mess and blamed for the act. Toilets overflow, cash registers don't open, fares increase at midnight, and a bouncer, in the vein of Kafka's Before the Law, frustratingly withholds entry to a club. When he returns to find the now dead Marcy, the suicide itself is second fiddle to his unwrapping of her corpse. In a blow of cruel irony, he finds he has blown his chance with someone flawless and beautiful, as her porcelain skin reveals no blemishes. The forces and creatures of witching hour mock him at every turn - their dialogue cackles and reminds him of each misfortune, each turn of bad luck and missed opportunity. He can do nothing but submit to the surreality of the night. In After Hours, a character says he will be back in two minutes, and returns a little more than an hour later.

Am I crazy, or did this movie run on cable back in the 1990's as a longer, maybe Director's cut, movie? I remembered the movie portraying Paul's adventure being longer, more convoluted, and that I could feel his desperation to get home. I just bought and watched the movie from Amazon, and this 97 minutes falls short of my recollection.I read under trivia that the original cut was 45 minutes longer. While I don't recall it being 2 hours 22 minutes, I still think what I saw was longer than an hour and a half. Seems to me that 45 minutes of Scorsese's best work may have been "left on the cutting room floor!" I really would like to see a Director's Cut of this film. It is too good to have been cut back to TV length.