CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

LeonLouisRicci Film-Noir Scholars (and that includes the evolutionary sub-genre Neo-Noir) seem to Love this Jim Thompson Adaptation Directed by James Foley. The Director is at Home with this Type of Thing, but here He delivers a rather Weak and Unstylish Film.Style is Essential to Film-Noir. It's Best when Wrapped up in Surreal Flourishes that give the Sense of a World Off Its Axis, Out of its Orbit, and destined for Oblivion. Cynical Characters and Snappy Patter also work to Make the Noir World Accessible to Outsiders Peeking in on the Doomed Characters.None of that is Evident Here Except On Occasion and in Spurts. One of the Weakest Elements is the Miscasting of Rachel Ward. She looks Anemic and Awful and Hardly the Sex Magnet She is Playing. After the initial Scene in the Bar, She Loses Her Edge and Vacillates wildly in Attitude and Behavior. Jason Patric Fares much Better and Bruce Dern is Expectedly Eccentric and Scary.But the Plot is Muddled, the Kidnapping Never is Convincing and the follow-up Third-Act is All Over the Place. It's an Awkward Movie that is Never as Compelling as its Pretensions, starting with a Title that is Nonsensical. Overall, Hardly One of the Best Neo-Noirs and is about to Below Average, although as Stated above some Credentialed Critics Disagree.You Might want to Check This One Out, it's Not Awful, and Make Up Your Own Mind about its Value as a Top-Notch Neo-Noir and as an Entertainment.

Mark Adams A masterpiece on all levels, with a constant undercurrent of high-voltage electricity charging every moment. A spectacularly beautiful movie.From Wikipedia entry; I cannot put it any better: Roger Ebert in his Great films review of the movie wrote "After Dark, My Sweet is the movie that eluded audiences; it grossed less than $3 million, has been almost forgotten, and remains one of the purest and most uncompromising of modern film noir. It captures above all the lonely, exhausted lives of its characters." Writer David M. Meyers praised the script "The screenplay, which hews closely to Jim Thompson's heartless novel, is unusually tight, spare, and well constructed."

timmy_501 After Dark, My Sweet is a film with a classic noir set-up: a desperate man teams up with a violent drifter and an alcoholic widow to kidnap a rich child. Director James Foley takes this plot and makes the best film that could possibly have been made with an already good premise. It helps that this is based on a short novel by Jim Thompson, a writer whose pulpy crime plots-which focus more on twisted characters than plot details-seem to work especially well on the screen.The main character here is ex-boxer Kid Collins, a drifter who is troubled by an incident from his past. He's so troubled that he seems strange to everyone he encounters; this inspires extreme reactions so that people he has just met are equally as likely to try physical violence on him as they are to try to take him home. His skewed perspective is especially well represented by scenes that suddenly end with jarring transitions that seem to strike like lightning. Troubled as he is, he usually seems to have the best interests of others at heart. Given a chance to escape the plot he's about to be pulled into, he refuses it because he sees a chance for a real connection with the widow.So, this film has all the best elements of noir: a troubled anti-hero, a desperate criminal plot, and a sense of weary inevitability in the way the plot unfolds. The visuals, editing, direction, and acting are all top notch and this has one of those great endings that gives the viewer a new way to look at everything that has happened before. This compares well with the best noir and neo-noir films ever made; in fact, I'm shocked by its obscurity.

vlvetmorning98 The first of two Jim Thompson adaptations released in 1990 (the other being the more well-known GRIFTERS), AFTER DARK has all of Thompson's hallmarks: dangerous women, the confidence game, and characters that are either not as dim as others suspect them of being, or not as harmless.Jason Patric is superb as a former boxer disqualified from the sport for life due to an incident in the ring (director James Foley uses RAGING BULL-esquire sequences to flesh out the back story) and the too-little-seen Rachel Ward also delivers a great performance. But Bruce Dern is the film's secret weapon: his sweet-talking grifter Uncle Bud subtly commands each of his scenes.there's almost no comic relief in this film, so watch it prepared to be sucked into the void.