After Hours

Scorsese's leanest, funniest film traps a mild office worker in a downtown Manhattan that turns, over one endless night, into a Kafkaesque maze of bad luck, hostile strangers, and escalating absurdity. Everything that can go wrong does, with a comic logic that tightens like a noose, until the city itself seems to be conspiring to keep him from getting home. It is a black comedy of paranoia and helplessness, shot with restless energy, and it understands the specific dread of a night that will not end. It is minor Scorsese only in scale; in craft it is razor-sharp.