It’s a shaggy dog story leading to a punchline, of sorts, but one that feels woozy and illusory; it is not like a nightmare exactly, but a strange dream that’s difficult to shake on waking.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 20, 2024

Martin Scorsese’s After Hours mines urban anxiety to unsettling yet often hilarious effect.

| Jul 20, 2023

It might not make any sense. It might not even matter. But it's a blast while it lasts, and it brings the most perfect of endings along with the sunrise.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 9, 2018

That "After Hours" fails to satisfy, that it derails, that even its own director tires of the material halfway through, would disappoint no one if the name of Martin Scorsese didn't appear above the title.

| Jan 2, 2018

After Hours is dazzling movie making; you could get a giddy kick just from cinematographer Michael Ballhaus' shot as a set of house keys floats down toward the camera, tossed from a top-floor apartment.

| Mar 18, 2015

Like many of Scorsese's earlier pictures, After Hours has a fascination with the bizarre. But the new film is lighter in spirit than any Scorsese film, with the possible exception of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

| Mar 18, 2015

It's not that they don't make comedies like After Hours anymore. The fact is there's never been a comedy quite like this one.

| Mar 18, 2015

It's his most-un-Scorsese-like film, and it's an overlooked gem.

| Mar 18, 2015

The result is a delirious and challenging comedy, a postmodern Ulysses in Nighttown.

| Jan 25, 2010

Martin Scorsese's take on NYC puts a hip spin on Joe Minion's cleverly constructed nightmare.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 31, 2008

Anxiety-ridden picture would have been pretty funny if it didn't play like a confirmation of everyone's worst fears about contemporary urban life.

| Mar 31, 2008

Scorsese's orchestration of thematic development, narrative structure, and visual style is stunning in its detail and fullness; this 1985 feature reestablished him as one of the very few contemporary masters of filmmaking.

| Mar 31, 2008

Inventive film-making of the first order.

| Jun 24, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 16, 2004

After Hours is not, ultimately, a satisfying film, but it's often vigorously unsettling. In this season of homogenized pap, that should be read as praise.

| Aug 30, 2004

After Hours is like one of those stories about a driver from out of town who takes the wrong turnoff on a big city expressway and winds up having an awful but memorable story to tell the folks back home... as long as he survives.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 25, 2004

Scorsese's showmanship ends up enhancing the film's dreamlike, surrealist sense of encroaching hysteria.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 18, 2004

This is the work of a master filmmaker who controls his effects so skillfully that I was drained by this film.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 1, 2000