After Dark, My Sweet

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After Dark, My Sweet

R

1990

1h 54m

Crime

Drama

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Tomatometer

Popcornmeter

80%

Tomatometer

20 Reviews

61%

Popcornmeter

1,000+ Ratings

After escaping from a mental hospital, drifting ex-boxer Kid Collie (Jason Patric) meets an alcoholic widow, Fay (Rachel Ward), who entices him into performing maintenance work at her estate. When crooked Uncle Bud (Bruce Dern) joins the two, Fay's darker side begins to appear. Bud and Fay concoct a scheme to kidnap the son of a local wealthy family and have Collie carry out the dirty work, to which the troubled ex-boxer agrees, but he soon has second thoughts.

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Vincent Canby

New York Times

08/30/2004

3.5/5

A brisk, entertaining contemporary melodrama.

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Peter Travers

Rolling Stone

05/12/2001

The film is a hot-wired crime thriller that captures [Jim] Thompson's flair for hard action, malicious wit and fevered eroticism.

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Joe Brown

Washington Post

01/01/2000

Foley has brought the novel subtly up to date, and does a good job of maintaining Thompson's artful ambiguity.

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Jeffrey M. Anderson

Combustible Celluloid

11/20/2023

3.5/4

It's a modern noir that, rather than merely cheerfully copying the genre conventions, understands despair from the inside.

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Terry Francis

Southern Voice (Atlanta)

05/09/2023

1.5/4

The film gets mired in unbelievable plot twists, and the screenplay wallows in a lot of phony angst.

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Rene Jordan

El Nuevo Herald (Miami)

11/03/2022

After Dark, My Sweet veers off from the source material rather scarcely, but serves to enrich it when it does. [Full review in Spanish]

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Alain E

@AlainE Jun 13

Crime doesn’t pay, if you believe this movie. The story is related by an aimless drifter who is sucked into a stupid plot of quick riches that involves kidnapping the little boy of a rich family. In the end he will find the courage to sacrifice himself. There is decent acting and cinematography. Music by Maurice Jarre is serviceable.

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Philip D

01/23/2022

Underrated kidnap sleeper feat. great turns by Rachel Ward as the boozy seductress and - in particular-Bruce Dern as the loser criminal.

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04/16/2020

Dragged and boring, somehow lost.

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12/22/2014

An odd crime film, one that surprises the viewer because you only know as much as the crazed boxer knows and it does not help that he is deranged. Jason Patric is excellent here; indeed his career now looks like one long missed opportunity. But at least he has this one to hang his hat on.

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07/24/2014

Jason Patric nos entrega una memorable actuación interpretando a un boxeador vagabundo enfrentado a una mujer fatal (Rachel Ward) y un criminal (Bruce Dern), en esta cinta "noir", basada en una novela de Jim Thompson ("The Grifters", "The Getaway"). Una excelente fotografía y una muy buena dirección por parte de James Foley, hacen de "After Dark My Sweet" una cinta casi obligatoria para los fanáticos del "noir".

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07/05/2014

Yet again, here I go reviewing a film from a while back('90). However, I just saw this again and had t give it a mention. Jason Patric is truly one of the better actors around but we rarely see him. In this one, he plays an ex-boxer who suffers from closed-head injury symptoms from blows to the head which can be seen by how he mumbles around due to his balance being affected. He gets mixed up with an alcoholic widow played by Rachel Ward and a burned out former lawman portrayed by another great actor by the name of Bruce Dern. These two lowlifes pull a reluctant Collie(Patric) into a kidnapping scheme in which the kid turns out to be diabetic making things all the more chaotic.

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James Foley

Director

Jason Patric

Kevin 'kid' Collins

Rachel Ward

Fay Anderson

Bruce Dern

Uncle Bud

George Dickerson

Doc Goldman

James Cotton

Charlie

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Synopsis

After escaping from a mental hospital, drifting ex-boxer Kid Collie (Jason Patric) meets an alcoholic widow, Fay (Rachel Ward), who entices him into performing maintenance work at her estate. When crooked Uncle Bud (Bruce Dern) joins the two, Fay's darker side begins to appear. Bud and Fay concoct a scheme to kidnap the son of a local wealthy family and have Collie carry out the dirty work, to which the troubled ex-boxer agrees, but he soon has second thoughts.

Director: James Foley
Producer: Ric Kidney, Robert Redlin
Production Co: Avenue Pictures Productions
Rating: R
Genre: Crime, Drama
Original Language: English
Release Date (Theaters): Aug 24, 1990, Original
Release Date (Streaming): Jun 1, 2007
Box Office (Gross USA): $535.0K
Runtime: 1h 54m
Sound Mix: Surround

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