After Hours

Martin Scorsese won the Best Director Award in Cannes for this dizzying black comedy, considered by many to be among his very best films. One night in New York’s SoHo, Paul Hackett, a young computer programmer leading an uneventful life, meets a woman in a café and thinks he is on his way to a date. A few hours later, all he wants is to get home. Instead, he is drawn into a surreal odyssey of strange encounters, misunderstandings and eccentric characters, as the city grows increasingly bizarre and threatening. With Michael Ballhaus’s virtuoso cinematography and Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing, Scorsese transforms nighttime New York into a vibrant urban jungle and builds a comic nightmare that moves between anxiety and absurdity. The film also captures the SoHo of the 1980s – a nocturnal world of artists, clubs and eccentrics that has all but disappeared. Forty years later, After Hours remains one of Scorsese’s most surprising and enjoyable films, and one of the great comedies of the 1980s.