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Mr. Scorses's little off-beat picture between more acclaimed work remains one of my favorites and it gets better every time I see it. It gets under your skin -- it's a tale of paranoia that seems retro-geared from the mid '80s for our time -- and, at the same time, it's still as laugh out loud funny as when I first saw it during its original release. I've never been to New York City but Scorsese's best, "Taxi Driver", not as damning in its '70s milieu as people think, -- and Letterman's Late Night and years of SNL as well as Woody Allen and Spike Lee -- make me love the particularity of the city in a cool, detached way but "After Hours" has a weird universality to it, too. It's a voyage to get back home, hampered by beautiful, crazy women, frustrated gay men, hostile cab drivers, toll-takers, thieves, burly bartenders, performance artists, punks, and a vigilante mob lead by a Mr. Softee ice cream truck; a journey confused by protagonist Paul Hackett's conflicting drives and desires and sensibilities. This is comedy as nightmare and yet you believe in every second -- and it's all the more nightmarish. "I just wanted to meet a girl", implores Paul, "And now I've got to die for it!?". Stripped down and bare boned as compared with Mr. Scorsese's more acclaimed work, he provides (along with a perfect cast, a smart-eyed shooter, and his usual whip-smart cutter) a picture that stays with you and that you'll watch again and again -- especially when the world around you grows too weird.

I recently watched A HARD DAY'S NIGHT at a local bar on their pull-down projection screen and around me I saw a roomful of people with big, fat smiles on their faces. I also saw a few melancholy faces, too, and I understood those as well, sort of. I'd seen the film many times before -- I rank it in my top 20 -- and it remains, always, fast, funny, and smart (shot in a kind of luminous black and white by Gil Taylor -- "...Strangelove", "Star Wars"). Director Richard Lester and writer Alun Owen caught a moment in time like lightning in a bottle and turned it into a jumpy, jangly thing that is as hot as it is cool and everlasting as The Beatles' music. I hesitate to write about their music or the stand-out moments in the picture (the lads were naturals, weirdly so} -- there are too many of those moments and part of the joy of the film is discovering them from that first, familiar guitar stroke onwards -- but I want to touch on that melancholy I saw in those faces. It's more than nostalgia. This is a depiction of a time that people born years after the killing of John Lennon watch and want to be a part of. You watch and want to be part of something just because it feels right. Roger Ebert was dead-on when he called this one of the great life-affirming motion pictures -- its liveliness alone is one of a kind.

Tom Hanks put a lot into this smart and funny off-beat picture (it's almost the cinematic equivalent of his persona when you see him interviewed on Letterman -- maybe it's that personally felt) which depicts the-rise-and-that's-all history of a one hit wonder band in the just post- British invasion '60s. It's hip and square at the same time and that damn song, played again and again in pleasing variations, is exactly right. The casting of the band mates, notably Jonathan Schaech (a wannabe Lennon or Dylan), Steve Zahn (a Ringo kind of goof) and Tom Everret Scott, a young Hanks lookalike, who has artistic jazz-minded desires, make for an ensemble that is heartfelt, real and friendly-- oh, and Ethan Embry plays the bass player. Hanks himself gives one of his best, and most understated, performances as the band's big-time producer/Svengali and Liv Tyler is the lead singer's perfect girlfriend, Faye -- "Well, Faye's special", says Hanks himself at one point and we know, any one who's been around a rock'n'roll band knows, he's right. Light, airy, kind of weird -- all the terrific (as well as the terrifically awful music -- "Lovin' You Lots and Lots" by the Norm Wooster Singers) is original to the film -- "That Thing...", even as it falters a little in its final third, makes you happy to watch a movie that its players and its makers are more than giddy to present.