SOURCE: "Where Angels Fear to Tread," in Sight and Sound, Vol. 55, No. 3, Summer, 1986, pp. 208-09.

In the following positive review of After Hours, Combs discusses some of the film's primary motifs and asserts that this film signals a change in Scorsese's outlook, from a belief or fascination with redemption to an emphasis on purgatorial limbo and predestination.

There have been signs recently of something of a religious transformation in Martin Scorsese's work. Not a conversion, exactly; more a change of temper. It may be that some component of his ethnic temper has gone, the Italian Catholic connection (which was still very evident in the WASP Middle America of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore or the echt movie fantasy of New York, New York). It may be that his theology—and his sense of life in Manhattan—has shifted from its first scorching premise (go straight to hell, do...