After Dark, My Sweet

One of the purest and most uncompromising of modern films noir. It captures above all the lonely, exhausted lives of its characters. Read full review

Nobody trusts anybody, and they're right. Dern, always awkward, has matured into a showpiece of behavioural hairpin bends. Excellent. Read full review

Director-cowriter James Foley has given this near-perfect adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel a contempo setting and emotional realism that make it as potent as a snakebite. Read full review

A hot-wired crime thriller that captures Thompson's flair for hard action, malicious wit and fevered eroticism. Read full review

This is a miniature classic, a pulp tragedy. [29 Sep 1990]

It’s a pungently atmospheric little sleeper, and one of relatively few genre flicks to portray a mentally unsound protagonist as a recognizable human being—someone who really just has one particular screw loose, such that you might not notice unless you happened to stumble against that particular joint. Read full review

Like a hot Santa Ana wind, this sexy, unsentimental thriller makes your senses tingle. [03 Sep 1990, p.66]

After Dark, My Sweet sticks to essentials, and nails the fatefulness in this doom-haunted genre. [24 Aug 1990, p.35p]

Foley's direction approaches perfection, almost always avoiding thriller cliches and showy distractions in favor of a crisp yet imaginative visual style. After Dark, My Sweet delivers the goods as a crime movie, but it is a fascinating character study as well. [14 Sep 1990, p.3F]

As the drama circles their inaction, this trio of excellent performances fills the screen with a form of spiritual exhaustion, and the film slumps into noir’s typically happy-clappy comeuppance of failure, betrayal and ruin. But the mood has caught on, and the film, stamped with a stunning visual emptiness, haunts the memory for long after its sour close. Read full review

Director James Foley and his co-screenwriter Robert Redlin have pulled Thompson's story out of film noir shadows and set it unflinchingly in the desert's orange-red glare. Read full review

James Foley slowly tautens the tension and turns up the erotic heat, shading this lowlife love-crime story in vaguely depressed shades of gray and burnt-out brown. Read full review

Director James Foley and cinematographer Mark Plummer deftly conjure the sense of stifling containment that drives these characters to drink or sin, but Robert Redlin's screenplay fails to fully animate their personalities. Patric gives a tremendous, smoldering performance, but Ward fails to convey the mysterious radiance of a convincing femme fatale. Dern rounds out the unappetizing triangle with an unpleasant performance, proving himself a worthy contender in the Dennis Hopper/Harry Dean Stanton creepstakes. Read full review

After Dark, My Sweet does capture Thompson's characteristic mood - a sort of lurid fatality, where moral questions have long since dropped out and there isn't much use struggling - but it doesn't have much of his distinctive, disruptive texture. The film is much too smooth for that, much too professional and much too carefully executed. [24 Aug 1990, p.H]

Loneliness, mistrust and love keep turning the tables on each other in a terrific suspense thriller. [24 Aug 1990, p.E1]

James Foley's screen adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1955 novel has its flaws - it's a little too mannered for its own good - but Patric is close to perfection. [24 Aug 1990, p.22]

James Foley's After Dark, My Sweet is a brisk, entertaining contemporary melodrama about the kind of sleazy characters who populated California crime literature 35 years ago. That's no surprise, since the screenplay, adapted by Robert Redlin and Mr. Foley, is based on Jim Thompson's novel, published in 1955. Read full review

What really holds the movie together is Rachel Ward's exceptionally moving portrayal of Fay. [07 Sep 1990, p.7]

The movie doesn't really earn its big, overwrought finale, and after it's over it appears quite full of holes. But it's a handsome curiosity. [31 Aug 1990, p.G5]

Dern's dirtball performance gives After Dark, My Sweet a desperately needed quality of slugged-out authenticity -- he gives the movie its edge. If anything, though, Foley makes Thompson's killing universe too inviting, too sunny and comfortable. He's missed the essence of Thompson, but all in all, there are worse ways of failing. Read full review

After Dark, My Sweet is cool and compelling for about 45 minutes, but it has a clinical, hothouse garishness that grows oppressive. Read full review

Foley's screenplay and direction constantly require viewers to re-evaluate the trio and their relationship with one another. This works as long as the dialogue is tolerable, which isn't long enough. [07 Sep 1990, p.6]

Nothing works in this over-elaborate let's-kidnap-a-kid melodrama. [24 Aug 1990]