After Hours

This has to be one of Martin Scorsese’s weirder films. Not that he has confined himself to violent tales of the Mafia, though he has made a lot of those. But this one is just … weird. It follows Griffin Dunne on a late night ramble around Manhattan’s downtown area, when he meets Rosanna Arquette in a diner and is invited back to her apartment. Naturally, he is hopeful that he can score with her, but it quickly becomes apparent that she is way too strange to get involved with. She lives in a huge loft with Linda Fiorentino, who makes sculptures out of plaster of Paris and newspaper, and she is even stranger. Trying to escape this place, he ends up in more and more fantastic scrapes. Everything that can go wrong goes wrong, until he is being pursued by half of Greenwich Village as a suspected burglar. None of this is played for slapstick, and there are no real jokes, just a series of people and situations that gradually makes him doubt his sanity. I liked it a lot, but I can see it wouldn’t be for everybody. The rest of the cast includes Cheech and Chong, Teri Garr, Catherine O’Hara, and John Heard.