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After Hours (1985)
One of the enduring strengths of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours is the half-dozen different audience readings and experiences it can provide.
For starters, you could simply let the film’s dream-logic comedy crash on you like a wave, as Upper Eastsider Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) ventures downtown to meet a stranger (Rosanna Arquette) in Soho, loses his cash and his keys, and experiences the neighborhood slowly encircling him like a boa constrictor.
Then, within After Hours’ surrealist packaging, there’s the intense tactility of the film’s dripping papier-mâché sculptures, 24-hour diners, German leather clubs and the bizarre sensation of Paul getting rained on and drying off three different times.
Or sink your teeth into the period-specific cultural tourism of an ‘80s yuppie who tries to mesh with artists and service-industry workers and has his bubble burst by a string of recognizable bit players (Catherine O’Hara chief among them).
What’s more, there’s a compelling reading here about how far off the handle a person would fly if they were unhoused for even 10 hours, convinced in short order (and not wrong) that the city is out to end them.
Best of all, in 97 exhilarating minutes, Scorsese balances all these qualities in a film that’s rarely mentioned alongside his opuses but probably should be. It takes a generational filmmaker to put an audience through a spin cycle so patently unreal and gritty at the same time. 5th Avenue, April 28-30.
ALSO PLAYING:
Academy: Spirited Away (2001), April 28-May 4. Cinema 21: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), April 29. Clinton: Sorry to Bother You (2018), May 1. Hollywood: True Stories (1986), April 27. Tammy and the T-Rex (1994), April 28. Back to the Future (1985), April 29. Suburbia (1983), April 29. Kwaidan (1964), April 30.