Weekend watch: ‘After Hours’ is Martin Scorsese’s ‘gajab raat’
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In Manoj Bajpayee’s latest film Gajab Raat, the actor entertainingly plays a corrupt police inspector whose conscience is pricked during a complex investigation. Although Ritesh Shah’s film promises a strange night, the various characters the cop meets are actually garden-variety shady.
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To get a solid measure of the true bizarreness that can unfold after the sun has set, there are few films as unnerving and riveting as Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. Made in 1985, in between The King of Comedy and The Color of Money, After Hours follows a computer technician in New York City who, while pursuing a date, faces one nightmare after another.
After Hours can be rented from Prime Video. The film contains several trademark elements of Scorsese’s filmmaking: expressive camerawork that brings out the emotional states of the characters, richly textured locations and eccentric New Yorkers.
Paul (Griffin Dunne) meets Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) at a diner and takes her up on her offer to visit the apartment she shares with a sculptor. Already, Michael Ballhaus’s camera is zooming in on the characters and their surroundings in an unsettling manner. If Paul was one of the viewers of After Hours rather than the film’s protagonist, he would have turned back and gone home.
Instead, Paul goes to Marcy’s apartment, where he meets her roommate Kiki (Linda Fiorentino). The...