As we all attempt to navigate the endless glut of available movies and shows that we now have access to all the time, the issue becomes one of making a decision. If you’re navigating Amazon Prime Video, you might struggle to select a single title worth watching at the expense of all the others.
That’s why it can be helpful to prioritize things based on what won’t be there in a few days. If that’s how you want to pick your next movie, then we’d recommend starting with After Hours, which is leaving Prime Video at the end of February. It follows an uptown New Yorker who struggles to make his way home and has a wild night in New York. Here are three reasons you should check it out.
We also have guides to the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.
It’s a tribute to living in New York
Anyone who knows anything about Martin Scorsese understands that the director is a New Yorker through and through. That’s never more apparent than in After Hours, where Scorsese pays homage to the possibility of pulling an all-nighter in a city that truly never sleeps.
The events of After Hours are only possible in New York, Scorsese seems to suggest, and just as crucially, the movie preserves the New York of the mid-1980s in amber, an era when the city was transitioning from the dangerous place it had been into something totally new.
It feels just as wild today
It’s totally possible that After Hours could feel quaint by modern standards, but instead, it feels like a movie documenting the kind of night you might not be able to have in New York anymore. Griffin Dunne’s central character bounces from circumstance to increasingly absurd circumstance in an era before the internet and cell phones, when it felt like a live possibility that you could just never get back to a home that was only a few miles away.
The specifics of New York culture at that moment are also hard to replicate and a reminder of all the different kinds of people stacked on top of one another in the city.
Griffin Dunne is remarkable at the center
Griffin Dunne is not the biggest actor that Scorsese ever worked with, but he might be one of the director’s most perfectly cast leading men. Dunne’s Paul is the perfect nobody, a man who goes through life trying not to be noticed and finds himself quickly frazzled by his exasperating circumstances.
Robert De Niro is too cool for this kind of role. Paul’s simple desire to get back uptown is endlessly relatable, even as his inability to do so provides Scorsese’s audience with endless entertainment.
Stream After Hours on Prime Video.
