After Hours - 1985 - 2½ Stars

Actors: Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette
Director: Martin Scorsese

After Hours is one of the least recognized films in the Scorsese canon, and with good reason - it's utterly forgettable, more of an exercise in filmmaking than an actual film. It's goofy and dark and one of those homages to New York, kind of the late-night version of Quick Change - who knows who you may meet on a Soho street! There's a few inspired bits - a punk club called Berlin with cages, barbed wire, and guards surveying the crowd is hilarious, both as a sight gag and mockery of New York chic - but manic taxi drivers and the loopiness of arty New Yorkers isn't exactly going over new ground in 1985, much less today.

I suppose the film's loose plot and general surreality is mimicking the randomness of dreams, but too often dreams are uninteresting to anyone besides the dreamer. I think I've used that line before on here, which means that I am uninteresting.