Not as famous as the movies that surrounded it, but After Hours is very much Scorsese at his peak. Griffin Dunne finds himself in a late night fever dream, swallowed up by the craziness of SoHo when it was still SoHo. And no matter how hard he tries, he cannot get home. Each time he seems to be making progress some increasingly absurd and violent intervention sends him right back to square one. People die. Mobs form. Mohawks happen.
He is not released, literally or figuratively, until the clock tolls the hour for work and he can stagger back into the cocoon of middle class office life. This is a movie for all of us who both envy and fear the chaos that lives outside our middle-class, hard working lives. And whether it is sex or art that pulls us there, Scorsese is happy to remind us why most of prefer our lives boring. (TCM)