Our protagonist is DTW, until it becomes apparent the world is a terrible place and he should just go home and tuck under the covers. Martin Scorsese’s wonderfully frantic and apocalyptic 1985 feature, about a professional word processor (an increasingly sweat-slicked Griffin Dunne), spans an entire night in pre-Sweetgreen-ed, menace-tinged Soho. Think you “need to get out more”? After Hours is here to disabuse you of that notion. Andrew Pulver After HoursĪfter Hours: ‘wonderfully frantic and apocalyptic’. A film that really hasn’t dated in the slightest. But the reason, I think, this film goes so deep is its prescient insight into the increasing derangement that has consumed large swathes of American society, a creeping societal breakdown that if anything is more pronounced today. Robert De Niro is very funny, with his silly mustache and blow-waved hair, but he’s a little implausible as a stalker on that score he is outshone by Sandra Bernhard, whose needling neediness still jumps off the screen. Made shortly after (though conceived well before) the murder of John Lennon on the streets of New York, it’s concerned, most obviously, with the increasingly dangerous relationship between celebrities and their fans that amazing basement chatshow set has lost none of its freakiness in the interim. But I keep going back to The King of Comedy: it’s still the most unhinged, most unexpected and funniest of Scorsese’s movies.

Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Taxi Driver are the masterpieces, The Wolf of Wall Street the most entertaining, Mean Streets the most haunting.

Martin Scorsese has made so many great films, it’s tough to pick just one. The King of Comedy: ‘the most unhinged, most unexpected and funniest of Scorsese’s movies’.

20 century fox intro all