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It conveys, like nothing else in the director's body of work, the sheer joy that Martin Scorsese derives from making movies. It's funny, playful, and invigorating, with a style that positively whooshes you through the action. Working with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (best known at the time for his run of films with Fassbinder), Scorsese executes breathtaking camera movements indoors and outdoors alike, creating a sense of furious activity that betrays the film's limited playing space.

Scorsese stretches and warps time in this urban wonderland, juxtaposing frenetic camera movements against the backdrop of SoHo's eclectic nightlife. Overlooked upon its initial release, After Hours deserves its place among Taxi Driver and Raging Bull as one of the filmmaker's finest depictions of New York City.

It's a film of exquisite logic. Chaotic but running like clockwork, After Hoursis an entirely functional work that nevertheless feels like it's having a constant nervous breakdown. The greatest terror that the film proposes is that this randomly nasty world in which we live might make perfect sense.

How can a film about the night's seduction become a film about the nightmare of the unknown? How can a film about relief become a film about anguish? After Hours is a movie (as Stern saw well) full of tiny, complicated patterns: networks of exchange, spirals of circulating objects, hallucinatory substitutions. It's The Earrings of Madame de … (1953) gone berserk, off its leash.

What a great screenplay. What the fuck happened to Joseph Minion? He also wrote VAMPIRE'S KISS, which is worth watching just for the scenes between Nicolas Cage and Maria Conchita Alonzo (AM I GETTING THROUGH TO YOU, ALMA?), and then I don't know what happened to him. And I'm not going to troll the Internet to find out. The way information is doled out in this film is fucking masterful, an absolute clinic in implication and inference.

After Hours rarely gets included on lists of the great Scorsese films—it's too slight, too goofy, too clearly the work of a director trying to burn off some nervous energy... But that restlessness perfectly complements the feeling of creeping, comic paranoia that Paul experiences over the course of this long night's journey into day. It's as if the camera itself is attacking him, forever lunging and whirling and feinting in a way that keeps everything off-balance.

Poor Rosanna Arquette... she kills herself. Some date. Dear Lord, with Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy(remember De Niro's Rupert Pupkin taking his date out on a stalking session to Jerry Lewis' house?), Scorsese has directed some of the greatest worst dates in all of cinema. He also directed one of the greatest – in Goodfellas – but he excels at the bad ones. So much that he makes _me_ want to buy one of those bagel and cream cheese paperweights.

The movie stocks itself full of needlessly showy tracks, cranes, and zooms that only serve to plump up a movie whose offhanded modesty is its most promising quality. Scorsese's talent is obviously beyond dispute, but his tendency toward hollow showboating has rarely been more in evidence—a problem, too, in his follow-up movie The Color of Money, though at least that one capitalizes on the dichotomy between cockiness and subtle suavity as a thematic force.

Like all of Scorsese's New York-set films, After Hours lovingly documents the city's manic idiosyncrasies and architecture: the wet pavement of empty streets reflects cathedral-like warehouses; a Mister Softee truck is used as a vehicle for vigilante justice, all the while playing that distinctive jingle; the MTA agent at the Spring Street station is completely unhelpful. By all means, see it on the big screen for full, uncomfortable effect.

After Hours is eternally underrated. It's also one of Scorsese's very best films. It breaks free of convention and critical expectation and conveys the kind of passion usually evident only when a major Hollywood "auteur" director goes back to his "indie" roots. Europeans got it even if many of Scorsese's home audience did not: After Hours won him the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival, and still seems his best attempt at working with the film medium as a freehand form of art.

Reeling from a series of flops in the late '70s and early '80s, Scorsese admits he felt out of touch with the new blockbuster-driven studio system, so he retreated to his independent roots with After Hours, a caffeinated black comedy with an emphasis on speed. With a small crew and a tight shooting schedule, Scorsese transformed limited means into a staccato burst of creative energy.

The script is a relentless excursion into pure sadism, and by the time Catherine O'Hara shows up to become the third blond chick to go psychotic and attempt to destroy Paul's sense of masculine sexual confidence, many an audience member will likely have already cashed in on their empathy and cut their losses. Still, there's a welcome, insistently radical subtext behind the scenario.