this week in film and television

ILLUMINATING MOONLIGHT: MOONLIGHT / KILLER OF SHEEP / SILENT LIGHT / THREE TIMES

Chiron (Alex Hibbert) looks out at a hard future in Barry Jenkins’s powerful MOONLIGHT

MOONLIGHT (Barry Jenkins, 2016)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Thursday, January 5, 6:30
Series runs January 4-9
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org
moonlight-movie.com

The Film Society of Lincoln Center is paying tribute to one of the best films of the year, Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, with the six-day series “Illuminating Moonlight,” running January 4-9 and consisting of screenings of the L.A.-based writer-director’s 2008 debut, Medicine for Melancholy, starring Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins, which Jenkins will introduce; his follow-up, Moonlight, which will be followed by a Q&A with Jenkins; and six diverse works that directly influenced Jenkins in making Moonlight: Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, Nagisa Ôshima’s Gohatto, and Claire Denis’s Beau Travail. In Moonlight, Jenkins tells the powerful and moving story of Chiron, a shy, troubled boy growing up in Liberty City, Florida, in three chapters as Chiron goes from a young boy (Little, played by Alex Hibbert) to a teenager (Chiron, played by Ashton Sanders) to a twenty-seven-year-old man (Black, played by Trevante Rhodes). The semiautobiographical film is based on playwright and actor Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue and Jenkins’s own experiences; both men are from Liberty City but did not know each other there. In the first section, Little is chased by bullies and runs into an abandoned building, where he is found by Juan (Mahershala Ali), a drug dealer who brings him home to his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe). They become a kind of surrogate family, as Little’s mother, Paula (Naomie Harris), is a crack addict who will do just about anything for her next score. Little also finds solace in his friendship with Kevin (Jaden Piner, later played by Jharrel Jerome and André Holland). In the second chapter, Chiron is taunted and bullied by Terrel (Patrick Decile) while trying to come to terms with his sexual orientation. In the third section, the passage of time reveals how much has changed, although the film turns overly melodramatic at the end. Taking its inspiration from the source material, Moonlight is beautifully photographed by James Laxton, who has previously shot Medicine for Melancholy and Jenkins’s 2003 shorts, My Josephine and Little Brown Boy, and 2011 “Remigration” episode of Futurestates, bathing the film in lush blues. Jenkins’s subtly paced style is accompanied by a gorgeous classical-inspired score by Nicholas Britell (The Big Short). Moonlight is anchored by superb performances by Emmy nominee Ali (House of Cards, Hidden Figures) as the cool and caring Juan; Harris (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, 28 Days Later) as the drug-addicted Paula, who has lost control of her life; Monáe (Hidden Figures, The Electric Lady) as the sweet and understanding Teresa; and Sanders (The Retrieval) as the in-between Chiron, who feels overwhelmed by all the maelstrom swirling around him.

Charles Burnett’s KILLER OF SHEEP examines black life in postwar America

KILLER OF SHEEP (Charles Burnett, 1977)
Wednesday, January 4, 7:00
Sunday, January 8, 8:45
www.filmlinc.org
www.killerofsheep.com

In 2007, Milestone Films restored and released Charles Burnett’s low-budget feature-length debut, Killer of Sheep, with the original soundtrack intact; the film had not been available on VHS or DVD for decades because of music rights problems that were finally cleared. (The soundtrack includes such seminal black artists as Etta James, Dinah Washington, Little Walter, and Paul Robeson.) Shot on weekends for less than $10,000, Killer of Sheep took four years to put together and another four years to get noticed, when it won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival. Reminiscent of the work of Jean Renoir and the Italian neo-Realists, the film tells a simple story about a family just trying to get by, struggling to survive in their tough Watts neighborhood in the mid-1970s. The slice-of-life scenes are sometimes very funny, sometimes scary, but always poignant, as Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) trudges to his dirty job in a slaughterhouse in order to provide for his wife (Kaycee Moore) and children (Jack Drummond and Angela Burnett). Every day he is faced with new choices, from participating in a murder to buying a used car engine, but he takes it all in stride. The motley cast of characters, including Charles Bracy and Eugene Cherry, is primarily made up of nonprofessional actors with a limited range of talent, but that is all part of what makes it all feel so real. Killer of Sheep was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989, the second year of the program, making it among the first fifty to be selected, in the same group as Rebel Without a Cause, The Godfather, Duck Soup, All About Eve, and It’s a Wonderful Life, which certainly puts its place in history in context. Killer of Sheep is screening January 4 and 8 in the “Illuminating Moonlight” series.

The beautifully minimalist SILENT LIGHT served as an influence on Barry Jenkins’s MOONLIGHT

SILENT LIGHT (STELLET LICHT) (Carlos Reygadas, 2007)
Thursday, January 5, 3:30
Sunday, January 8, 6:00
www.filmlinc.org

Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light is a gentle, deeply felt, gorgeously shot work of intense calm and beauty. The film opens with a stunning sunrise and ends with a glorious sunset; in between is scene after scene of sublime beauty and simplicity, as Reygadas uses natural sound and light, a cast of mostly nonprofessional actors, and no incidental music to tell his story, allowing it to proceed naturally. In a Mennonite farming community in northern Mexico where Plautdietsch is the primary language, Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr) is torn between his wife, Esther (Miriam Toews), and his lover, Marianne (Maria Pankratz). While he loves Esther, he finds a physical and spiritual bond with Marianne that he does not feel with his wife and their large extended family. Although it pains Johan deeply to betray Esther, he is unable to decide between the two women, even after tragedy strikes. Every single shot of the spare, unusual film, which tied for the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival (with Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis), is meticulously composed by Reygadas (Japon, Battle in Heaven) and cinematographer Alexis Zabe, as if a painting. Many of the scenes consist of long takes with little or no camera movement and sparse dialogue, evoking the work of Japanese minimalist master Yasujiro Ozu. The lack of music evokes the silence of the title, but the quiet, filled with space and meaning, is never empty. And the three leads — Fehr, who lives in Mexico; Toews, who is from Canada; and Pankratz, who was born in Kazakhstan and lives in Germany — are uniformly excellent in their very first film roles. Screening January 5 and 8 in the “Illuminating Moonlight” series, Silent Light is a mesmerizing, memorable, and very different kind of cinematic experience.

Chang Chen and Shu Qi fall in love in three different decades in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s THREE TIMES

THREE TIMES (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005)
Friday, January 6, 4:00
Sunday, January 8, 3:00
www.filmlinc.org

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s gorgeous Three Times is an evocative, poetic trilogy of tales about life and love in Taiwan, all starring the mesmerizing Shu Qi (Hou’s Millennium Mambo) and the stalwart Chang Chen (Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 and Happy Together). In A Time for Love, set in 1966 and featuring a repeated soft-rock soundtrack, Chen, about to leave for military service, meets May, a pool-hall girl, and promises to write to her even though they have only just met and barely said a word to each other. When he gets a furlough, he goes to the pool hall only to find that she’s on the move, so with Zen-like cool he tries to track her down. A Time for Freedom, a silent film with interstitial dialogue and period music, takes place in an elegant brothel in 1911, where Mr. Chang regularly visits a beautiful courtesan. But while she dreams of him buying out her contract and marrying her, he seems intent on helping out another couple instead. Hou concludes the trilogy with A Time for Youth, set in fast-paced modern-day Taipei, as Jing, an epileptic singer, and Zhen, a motorcycle-riding photographer, embark on a passionate, nearly wordless affair that has serious consequences for their significant others. Three Times is a rare treat for cineastes, a poetic, intelligent, though overly long study of relationships between men and women in a changing Taiwan over the last hundred years, focusing on character, time and place, and the art of filmmaking itself. Three Times is screening January 6 and 8 in the “Illuminating Moonlight” series.

DR. FEELGOOD: DEALER OR HEALER?

Dr. William Hurwitz playfully states his case in documentary about prescription painkiller addiction

DR. FEELGOOD: DEALER OR HEALER? (Eve Marson, 2016)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, December 30
212-529-6799
www.cinemavillage.com
www.drfeelgoodfilm.com

There’s an odd element that runs through Eve Marson’s documentary Dr. Feelgood: Dealer or Healer? In nearly every new interview with film subject Dr. William Hurwitz, whose treatment of chronic pain included prescribing sometimes tens of thousands of opioids over a twelve-to-eighteen-month period for a single patient, the physician has a sly smile, as if this is all a kind of joke, or that he doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “One of the best reasons to go into medical practice is to help people. When somebody comes to you and they feel their life is constrained by pain, the ability to relieve that pain gives enormous satisfaction,” he explains at the beginning of the film. And he is still very satisfied, despite the death of at least two of his patients, time in prison, and the loss of his medical license. The film points out that one in three Americans suffer from chronic pain and that more than 200 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers are written each year. Marson shows viewers several sides of the controversial topic, in interviews with Dr. Hurwitz’s daughter, Gabriela; his ex-wife, Nilse Quercia; his former nurse, Ann Wierbinski; his former receptionist, Georgia Tsourounis; his defense attorney, Lawrence Robbins; patients Molly Shaw, Bret McCarter, and Jane Tanner; pain-treatment expert Dr. Anna Lembke; FBI agent Aaron Weeter; retired Fairfax County police officer Ken Pedigo; New York Times journalist John Tierney; Paul Nye and Michaelina Woodson, who believe Dr. Hurwitz’s treatment killed their spouses; and retired physician Dr. Hal Talley, who points out, “We have never come up with a test that tells you whether somebody is in pain or not.”

The multiple perspectives reveal that there are no easy answers to this complex issue: Some see Dr. Hurwitz as an angel, while others are convinced he is a demon. Written by Mark Monroe and Sara Goldblatt and produced by Goldblatt and Marson, the film also includes archival footage, re-creations, and news reports, most notably from 60 Minutes. Through it all, Dr. Hurwitz, a Stanford grad, keeps wearing that grin, as if he thinks all of this detailed examination is rather beside the point. “I like taking care of people,” he says. That’s all well and good, but as Dr. Feelgood shows, addiction to painkillers is no laughing matter. The film opens December 30 at Cinema Village, with Marson participating in a Q&A following the 7:15 screening on January 2.

SCREENING + LIVE EVENT: ELLE WITH ISABELLE HUPPERT IN PERSON

The purr-fectly delightful Isabelle Huppert will discuss ELLE at a special screening and Q&A at the Museum of the Moving Image on January 4

The purr-fectly delightful Isabelle Huppert will discuss ELLE at special screening and Q&A at the Museum of the Moving Image on January 4

Who: Isabelle Huppert
What: Elle with Isabelle Huppert in person
Where: Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria, 718-777-6800
When: Wednesday, January 4, $25, 7:00
Why: French superstar Isabelle Huppert has been garnering worldwide acclaim for her latest film, Elle, directed by Paul Verhoeven, whose previous works include RoboCop, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Black Book. On January 4 at 7:00, the sixty-three-year-old Huppert, who has made more than 120 films, from The Lacemaker, Loulou, and Coup de Torchon to La Cérémonie, The Piano Teacher, and Heaven’s Gate, will be at the Museum of the Moving Image for a Q&A and special screening of Elle, a disturbing tour de force showcasing Huppert’s mesmerizing performance as either victim or monster. Feminists and film theorists might fight about this one for years; the rest of us can just marvel at Huppert, unable to take our eyes off her for a second.

CURATORS’ CHOICE: NO HOME MOVIE

Chantal Akerman creates a unique profile of her mother in deeply personal NO HOME MOVIE

NO HOME MOVIE (Chantal Akerman, 2015)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, January 1, 2:00
December 30 – January 8
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
icarusfilms.com

Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie was meant to be a kind of public eulogy for her beloved mother, Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, who died in 2014 at the age of eighty-six, shortly after Chantal had completed shooting forty hours of material with her. But it also ended up becoming, in its own way, a public eulogy for the highly influential Belgian auteur herself, as she died on October 5, 2015, at the age of sixty-five, only a few months after the film screened to widespread acclaim at several festivals (except at Locarno, where it was actually booed). Her death was reportedly a suicide, following a deep depression brought on by the loss of her mother. No Home Movie primarily consists of static shots inside Nelly’s Brussels apartment as she goes about her usual business, reading, eating, preparing to go for a walk, and taking naps. Akerman sets down either a handheld camera or a smartphone and lets her mother walk in and out of the frame; Akerman very rarely moves the camera or follows her mother around, instead keeping it near doorways and windows. She’s simply capturing the natural rhythms and pace of an old woman’s life. Occasionally the two sit down together in the kitchen and eat while discussing family history and gossip, Judaism, WWII, and the Nazis. (The elder Akerman was a Holocaust survivor who spent time in Auschwitz.) They also Skype each other as Chantal travels to film festivals and other places. “I want to show there is no distance in the world,” she tells her mother, who Skypes back, “You always have such ideas! Don’t you, sweetheart.” In another exchange, the daughter says, “You think I’m good for nothing!” to which the mother replies, “Not at all! You know all sorts of things others don’t know.”

Shots of a tree fluttering in the Israeli wind enhance the peaceful calm of NO HOME MOVIE

Later they are joined by Chantal’s sister, Sylviane, as well as Nelly’s home aide. The film features long sections with no dialogue and nobody in the frame; Akerman opens the movie with a four-minute shot of a lone tree with green leaves fluttering in the wind in the foreground, the vast, empty landscape of Israel in the background, where occasionally a barely visible car turns off a far-away road. Akerman returns to Israel several times during the film, sometimes shooting out of a moving car; these sections serve as interludes about the passage of time as well as referencing her family’s Jewish past. At one point, Akerman makes potatoes for her mother that they eat in the kitchen, a direct reference to a scene in Akerman’s feminist classic, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai due Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Knowing about what happened to both mother and daughter postfilming casts a shadow over the documentary, especially when Chantal tells her mother, “I’m in a very, very good mood. . . . Let’s enjoy it; it’s not that common.” As the film nears its conclusion, there is almost total darkness, echoing the end of life. Through it all, Akerman is proud of her mother; reminiscing about kindergarten, she remembers, “And to everybody, I would say, this is my mother.” No Home Movie achieves that very same declaration, now for all the world to see and hear. No Home Movie is screening January 1 at 2:00 in the Museum of the Moving Image eclectic 2016 wrap-up “Curators’ Choice,” which runs December 30 through January 8, consisting of ten films chosen by chief curator David Schwartz and associate film curator Eric Hynes that might have slipped past your radar, including Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, Vitaly Mansky’s Under the Sun, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster, Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits, followed by a Q&A with Holmer, Ezra Edelman’s 467-minute O.J.: Made in America, followed by a Q&A with Edelman and producer Caroline Waterlow, and Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, followed by a Q&A with Johnson and editor Nels Bangerter.

WELCOME TO METROGRAPH — A TO Z: PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID

Kris Kristofferson and James Coburn get involved in a violent bromance in Sam Peckinpah Western

PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Tuesday, December 27, 2:45, 8:30
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

The “Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z” series continues December 27 with the 122-minute “preview” director’s cut of Sam Peckinpah’s convoluted but compellingly curious Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The film is based on the real-life story of the two gunslingers; the former a sheriff who dedicates his life to tracking down and killing the latter, a kind of folk hero to the locals. Written by Rudy Wurlitzer (Two-Lane Blacktop, Walker), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a strange bromance flavored with colonialism, misogyny, and patriarchy, featuring lots of bloody violence. Unsurprisingly and disturbingly, nearly every female character is either a prostitute or a potential rape victim (or both). The relationship between the clean-shaven Kristofferson (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea) and Coburn (The Magnificent Seven, The President’s Analyst) is never properly established, somewhere between friends and enemies — the respect they have for each other is confusing — and the plot jumps around way too much. Meanwhile, among the films it evokes today is Brokeback Mountain, although that might not have quite been the director’s point.

Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs) casts the film with myriad cameos and small roles played by familiar faces, if not necessarily familiar names, and they’re worth pointing out here: Jason Robards, Harry Dean Stanton, Slim Pickens, Jack Elam, Chill Wills, John Beck, Charles Martin Smith, Richard Bright, Barry Sullivan, Richard Jaeckel, R. G. Armstrong, Katy Jurado, Matt Clark, Paul Fix, Luke Askew, Rutanya Alda, L. Q. Jones, Jack Dodson, Emilio Fernández, and Rita Coolidge, who married Kristofferson in 1973. However, the best casting is Bob Dylan as the smirking Alias, an oddball who says very little while remaining close to the action. Dylan also wrote the Grammy-winning soundtrack, which is anchored by the classic Western dirge “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Dylan sums up the mood of the film in “Billy 1,” singing, “They say that Pat Garrett’s got your number / So sleep with one eye open when you slumber / Every little sound just might be thunder / Thunder from the barrel of his gun.” In addition, Dylan is involved in the best exchange of dialogue in the picture. After getting his hair done, Garrett asks Alias, “Who are you?” to which Alias replies, “That’s a good question.” If you’ve only seen the studio-butchered 106-minute version, you’re in for a treat, as this cut is much better, though it’s still far from Peckinpah’s best. A 35mm print is screening at Metrograph on December 27 at 2:45 and 8:30; the alphabetical “Welcome to Metrograph” series continues this month with such other “P” flicks as Paper Moon, Performance, Point Blank, Punch-Drunk Love, and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.

PATERSON

Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani star as a happy New Jersey couple in Jim Jarmusch’s PATERSON

PATERSON (Jim Jarmusch, 2016)
Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
Opens Tuesday, December 27
212-330-8182
www.landmarktheatres.com
www.bleeckerstreetmedia.com

Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is a beautifully poetic, deceptively simple wonder about the beauty, poetry, and wonderful simplicity of life, an ode to the little things that make every day special and unique. Adam Driver stars as Paterson, a New Jersey Transit bus driver and poet who lives in Paterson with his girlfriend, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), who spends much of her time decorating their small, quaint house, painting black and white circles and lines on curtains, couches, dishes, walls, and even her clothing, continually creating works of art out of nearly everything she comes into contact with. The film takes place over an ordinary week for the sweet-natured couple, who are very much in love, each allowing the other the freedom to explore who they are and offering their complete support. Every morning, Paterson wakes up around 6:12, as the sunlight streaks over their sleeping bodies. He checks his Casio wristwatch to confirm the time — he doesn’t use an alarm clock, nor does he own a cell phone or a computer — then snuggles closer with Laura for a few extra minutes. He eats Cheerios out of a bowl painted by Laura with circles that match the shape of the cereal. He studies a matchbook, which becomes the starting point for his next poem. Lunchbox in hand, he walks to the Market St. garage and gets on board the 23 bus. He writes a few lines of poetry, listens to fellow bus driver Donny’s (Rizwan Manji) daily complaints, then heads out on his route through his hometown, picking up pieces of some very funny passenger conversations. For lunch he sits on a bench overlooking the Paterson Great Falls and composes more mostly non-rhyming lines in his “Secret Notebook,” which he will not show anyone but Laura. At quitting time, he walks home, checks the mail, fixes the tilted mailbox, sees what new art Laura has created, and takes their English bulldog, Marvin (Nellie, who won the Palm Dog at Cannes and passed away two weeks after shooting concluded), for a walk after dark, stopping for a beer and chatting with bar owner Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley). He then goes back home, ready to do it all over again the next day. But Paterson is no bored working-class suburbanite living out a dreary routine; he finds something new and special in every moment, from his job to his relationship to his nightly trips to the bar. Every day is different from the one before, Jarmusch celebrating those variations that make life such a joy.

Adam Driver plays a poetic New Jersey Transit bus driver named Paterson in PATERSON

Set to a subtle electronic score by Sqürl, Jarmusch and Carter Logan’s band, Paterson is a gorgeous film, lovingly photographed by Frederick Elmes, who captured a very different kind of town in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and edited to the sweet rhythm of a basic existence by Affonso Gonçalves. Paterson’s poems were written by award-winning poet Ron Padgett, who, like Jarmusch, studied with Kenneth Koch; the works, which unfold day by day, include the previously published “Love Poem” (a tribute to Ohio Blue Tip Matches and love), “Glow,” “Pumpkin,” and “Poem” as well as three written specifically for the film, “Another One,” “The Run,” and “The Line.” The words appear on the screen in a font based on Driver’s handwriting as he narrates them in voiceover. (Among the other poets referenced in the film are Frank O’Hara, Wallace Stevens, Petrarch, and Emily Dickinson.) The film is also very much about duality and pairs, which Jarmusch has said in interviews was not always intentional. Adam Driver, who served in the Marines, plays a driver and former Marine named Paterson who lives and works in Paterson. He is constantly seeing twins, from two brothers named Sam and Dave (Trevor and Troy Parham) to two young girls on his bus to two older men on a bench. While Paterson and Laura seem meant to be together, their happiness infectious, he looks on every night as Everett (William Jackson Harper) desperately pleads with Marie (Chasten Harmon) to take him back. At the bar, Paterson often speaks to Doc about the pictures on the wall of fame, photos about such native sons as Uncle Floyd and his brother, Jimmy Vivino, as well as local superstar Lou Costello, part of one of the most popular comedy duos ever with Bud Abbott, who was born in Asbury Park (and thus does not qualify for the wall). Paterson’s favorite poet is lifelong New Jersey-ite William Carlos Williams, who Laura playfully refers to as Carlos Williams Carlos. (In making the film, Jarmusch was inspired by one of Williams’s most popular phrases, “No ideas but in things.”) And when Paterson’s not encountering twins, he’s bumping into random poets (Sterling Jerins, Method Man, Masatoshi Nagase) during his walks. Paterson is a poetic marvel all its own, a dazzling film about love and harmony, about finding creativity in every aspect of life, led by marvelous performances by Driver and Farahani and written and directed by a master of cinematic restraint. Paterson opens December 27 at the Landmark Sunshine, with Jarmusch participating in a Q&A following the 7:15 show on December 30.

GOING STEADI — 40 YEARS OF STEADICAM: AFTER HOURS

Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) nightmare starts innocently enough while reading Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer in a diner in AFTER HOURS

Paul Hackett’s (Griffin Dunne) nightmare starts innocently enough while reading Henry Miller’s TROPIC OF CANCER in a coffee shop in AFTER HOURS

AFTER HOURS (Martin Scorsese, 1985)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, December 25, 6:00, and Monday, January 2, 9:15
Series runs through January 3
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org

“We are all alone here and we are dead,” Henry Miller writes in the first paragraph of Tropic of Cancer, which is the book narcissistic word processor Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is reading in a New York City coffee shop, catapulting him into a harrowing downtown nightmare in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant horror comedy, After Hours. Dunne, in one of his two best roles — the other was in John Landis’s very different horror comedy, 1981’s An American Werewolf in London — is exceptional as Hackett, a stand-in for the proverbial everyman seeking safety and home but bedeviled by circumstance, again and again and again. At the coffee shop, Hackett meets charming but unpredictable Marcy Franklin (Roseanna Arquette), who invites him over to her friend’s loft in SoHo. It’s already late, but the titillated Upper East Sider decides to takes a cab downtown; however, the last of his money, a twenty-dollar bill, literally flies out the window as his taxi driver (Larry Block) speeds like a madman through the mean streets of Manhattan. These eighties days predate ATMs, cashback, and Ubers, and Hackett spends the rest of his very long night encountering a bizarre cast of characters, none of whom seems able to give him the fifty-three cents he needs to cover the new subway fare of $1.50, which rose suddenly at midnight, plunging him into after-hours chaos. Among those he meets are kinky sculptor Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino) and her sadist lover, Horst (Will Patton); lonely cocktail waitress and sixties leftover Julie (Teri Garr); helpful bartender Tom (John Heard); possible thieves Neil (Cheech Marin) and Pepe (Tommy Chong); ice-cream-truck driver Gail (Catherine O’Hara); and lonely lady June (Verna Bloom). Not the best judge of character, at least partly because he’s not exactly a sympathetic listener, the Yuppie-ish Hackett is soon running through the streets of SoHo in the rain, chased by an angry vigilante mob.

Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) has plenty to scream about after meeting sculptor Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino) in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant black comedy

Written as a film-school project by Joseph Minion and inspired by Joe Frank’s monologue “Lies” (which led to a plagiarism battle), After Hours is shot in a modern noir style by regular Scorsese cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (Goodfellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Departed). Much of the film takes place in dark rooms and spaces; at one point, inside the S&M Berlin Club, Scorsese himself, in a cameo as a stage tech, shines a spotlight right into the camera, temporarily blinding the viewer. The many dichotomies in the film range from light and dark to uptown/downtown to fire and water; there are multiple references to fire and burns, as if Paul is trapped in a kind of hell, and it is often raining as he tries to find a way out. Paul’s metaphorical impotency is also a major theme; he keeps meeting women who are sexually attracted to him, but just as he can’t get north of SoHo, he has no luck in various bedrooms, for various reasons. In a bathroom, he sees a drawing of a shark chomping on an erect penis, and it’s no coincidence that Gail drives a Mr. Softee truck. The film also features cameos by character actors Clarence Felder as a bouncer, Dick Miller, Rocco Sisto, and Victor Argo as diner and coffee-shop employees, and Bronson Pinchot as Paul’s ambitious coworker, while the fab score ranges from Mozart and Bach to Joni Mitchell, the Monkees, Bad Brains, and Peggy Lee. A ferocious, fast-paced fantasia about abject loneliness, pretentious art, and the ever-present prospect of death, After Hours is screening December 25 and January 2 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Going Steadi: 40 Years of Steadicam,” which consists of twenty-nine films that feature the use of the Steadicam, invented by Garrett Brown and first used in 1976 in Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory; the Steadicam operator for After Hours was one of the masters, Larry McConkey (Goodfellas, The Silence of the Lambs, Kill Bill). The series runs through January 3 and also includes Goodfellas, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and The Shining, Warren Beatty’s Bulworth, Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia.