After Hours (in 250 words or less)

In 1984, the Bulletin of the Atomic scientists, thanks to an escalating arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, set the doomsday clock to three minutes to midnight. The last time the clock’s arm was moved so close was thirty years prior, when both superpowers first tested thermonuclear weapons. 1984 was also the year that Martin Scorsese, freshly disillusioned by the failure of his first attempt to make The Last Temptation of Christ, directed what is perhaps his most under-appreciated movie, After Hours. That clocks feature prominently in After Hours is probably a coincidence; it is, after all, a movie about a guy who stays up too late on a work night. But is it paranoiac to connect the clocks to all the other apocalyptic motifs? Empty streets? Mad-Max-esque vigilante gangs? References to burned flesh? A reoccurring sculpture that looks like a Pompeii victim? If After Hours isn’t explicitly about “the end,” it certainly feels like an end—of the world, the counterculture, of movies, of Scorsese’s own career*, etc. At one point, a diner owner claims that “after hours” means that “different rules apply.” Yeah, sure, he’s talking about free coffee, but he could just as easily being talking about the film itself, a movie that—even though it lacks the passion and scope of Scorsese’s more beloved works—really sticks with you long after its own clock stops ticking. -Matt Denvir

*This was fortunately not the case. Before the decade was out, he’d get to The Last Temptation of Christ, his passion project and a legitimate masterpiece. And after that, well, you know.