As we finish off the fourth week of March, we find ourselves barreling into April at top speed.
In addition to the plethora of new movies that will be added to streamers like Netflix and Prime Video, many excellent flicks will also be removed at the start of the month.
If you have to watch one movie before it leaves on April 3, Watch With Us recommends streaming After Hours on Netflix.
The highly underrated Martin Scorsese movie is a lesser-known inclusion in the gangster movie director’s oeuvre.
We break down why you can’t miss it.
It’s a Hilarious Comedy About One Man’s Descent Into Hell
After Hours stars Griffin Dunne as average computer worker Paul Hackett, who clocks out of his job in Uptown Manhattan and heads to a local diner to blow off some steam. There, he connects with a quirky woman named Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), and he accepts her invitation to join her at her apartment downtown, which she shares with her artist roommate Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), who makes plaster of Paris bagel paper weights. Paul’s increasingly chaotic night starts off to a bad start, when his only $20 flies out of his taxi cab window and he’s unable to pay his fare.
Things only get worse from here, and Marcy proves herself to be a much more erratic and unstable figure than he realized. Unsettled by why he experiences there, he abandons their date and ends up at a bar — one thing leads to another, and Paul ultimately becomes the subject of a neighborhood vigilante mob, in addition to the object of ire of several women; and he has no way of getting back. After Hours is a calamitous, topsy-turvy and absurd nighttime odyssey and will likely satisfy fans of movies like Good Time, Inherent Vice and Under the Silver Lake. Watching After Hours is like getting stuck in the funniest level of Hell out of Dante’s Inferno.
Every Performance in ‘After Hours’ Is a Standout
In addition to Dunne, Arquette and Fiorentino, After Hours’ terrific ensemble cast includes a number of great character actors, including Catherine O’Hara, Teri Garr, John Heard, Will Patton and Cheech and Chong, and pretty much everyone gets a moment to shine as a surreal and off-kilter personality. O’Hara plays an odd ice cream truck driver who initially offers Paul help but ultimately ends up leading a lynch mob against him. Garr plays a waitress who brings Paul to her apartment to sleep with him, but flirts so aggressively that Paul leaves — and she brands him a burglar in return.
Fiorentino’s Kiki is stoic and unnerving, while Heard plays perhaps the only character with truly innocent intentions for Paul; yet things go south there as well. Meanwhile, Arquette shines as Marcy, an initially likable character who progressively unspools the longer we spend time with her. Basically, every sequence in which Paul spends time with these characters exists as if it’s its own little “final boss” moment, Paul coming face-to-face with yet another obstruction on his endless quest to make his way back home uptown. Every actor perfectly inhabits their bizarre, surreal character that helps to establish the terrifically disorienting atmosphere of After Hours.
It’s One of Martin Scorsese’s Most Overlooked Movies
Griffin Dunne in After Hours. Warner Bros.
After Hours stands as an outlier among Scorsese’s storied filmography that otherwise largely consists of crime dramas and gangster pictures. Movies like The Age of Innocence and The Color of Money tend to get forgotten about, and that’s no coincidence — many of these movies come from the period of Scorsese’s career when he was essentially working for hire to fund the projects he actually wanted to make. Scorsese’s then-recent films, The King of Comedy and The Last Temptation of Christ, had both been box office bombs. Thus, Scorsese became attached to After Hours after director Tim Burton stepped away from the project, as a way to “actually” make some money.
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But After Hours is quietly one of Scorsese’s best movies; at least, in the humble opinion of the Watch With Us team. It’s a simple 97-minute film that’s incredibly funny, incredibly unique and completely unpredictable, featuring actors doing some of the weirdest performances of their careers. And Scorsese makes After Hours utterly his own, employing high-energy direction, ambitious camerawork and frenetic editing all woven together to make the movie feel like somewhere between a dream and a nightmare. The influence of After Hours lives on in pop culture, too — The Weeknd has cited the film as a major influence on his 2020 album of the same name.
