Mark Kermode’s top five night films

Before Sunrise (1995)
Hopping off a train in Vienna, American Ethan Hawke and Parisian Julie Delpy spend a night-time wondering whether they were made for each other. Along with Before Sunset and Before Midnight, this is part of that rarest of things – the perfect movie trilogy.

It Happened One Night (1934)
Frank Capra’s gem, from Samuel Hopkins Adams’s story Night Bus, remains a surprisingly racy transport of delight, as Clarke Gable and Claudette Colbert are thrown together in a screwball romantic odyssey.

American Graffiti (1973)
“Where were you in ’62?” Over the course of an extended evening, a group of young Californians attempt to figure out where they’re from and where they’re going in George Lucas’s finest film.

Into the Night (1985)
When Jeff Goldblum’s habitual insomniac takes a nocturnal drive, Michelle Pfeiffer’s anarchic force of nature lands on the bonnet of his car, in John Landis’s underrated cult classic.

Night on Earth (1991)
Five taxis, five cities, one night; Jim Jarmusch’s portmanteau takes in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki, with tragicomic results.

Laura Cumming’s top five night artworks

The Starry Night (1889)
Van Gogh
The sky is a sea of brilliant spirals and whorls that roll across the canvas, as if night was anything but dark and still.Beneath it the village lies sleeping and hushed. The green cypress flames up to heavens of cobalt and gold. Van Gogh found the night “much more alive and richly coloured than the day”.

Nighthawks (1942)
Edward Hopper
Four people shelter from the night in a diner. We see them from outside, and they are outsiders to one another. If they turned to us from their nocturnal isolation, they would be staring into outer darkness. Hopper’s painting measures the distance between artificial light and true night, separated by a pane of glass.

Cornfield by Moonlight (c1830)
Samuel Palmer This wonderful image of the day-for-night radiance of a harvest moon shows the cornfield holding the day’s warmth in its sheaves, and the evening star rising like a comet. But above all, it gives a nearly mystical depiction of those summer nights when the light appears scarcely switched off.

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941)
Ansel Adams
The dark night of the soul: Adams’s most famous photograph shows the moon standing guard over the dead kings of the wild frontier in a tiny New Mexico graveyard. It is well known that he had no time to check aperture or light meter that night, yet he somehow achieved this brilliant study of visible darkness.

Lightning Field (1977)
Walter De Maria
One of precious few artworks designed to be viewed by night, Walter de Maria’s land art installation in New Mexico comprises 400 steel rods receding in perfect perspective over more than a mile. An electric storm turns them into blazing flares that momentarily light up the blackness around them. People say the beauty of the installation is equal to the beauty of the night and the vast silence of outer space.

Kitty Empire’s top five night songs

Down in the Tube Station at Midnight
The Jam (1978)
Literal, yes, but the Jam’s evocation of 70s aggro remains a quintessential London-by-night anthem. A guy is on his way home to his wife; he gets jumped by thugs. TfL would probably stress that the tube is much safer now, but the sensitivity with which the 19-year-old Paul Weller describes the scene remains remarkable.

Pow! (Forward)
Lethal Bizzle (2004)
Grime’s breakout tune of 2004 here represents the actual London underground – an ever-evolving patchwork of pirate radio stations, MCs, sub-sub-genres and creativity. At the time, it was banned for creating mayhem in clubs, and remains one of the more uncompromising grime tracks to make it into the mainstream.

3am Eternal
The KLF (1992)
Literal, also. But this KFL song is redolent of the rave era, when clubbing was less about dressing up and more about getting pickled in your own sweat with like-gurning souls; a time when a distinctly British weirdness could clog up the charts in a gazillion countries.

The Litanies of Satan
Diamanda Galas (1982)
If the night can be said to be owned, an entire genre – goth – has long dedicated itself to staking out this territory. At the more recherché end of the genre is the pitilessly scary Diamanda Galas, who here intones an infamous Baudelaire poem, while pitch-shifted voices babble along demonically.

Burial LP
Burial (2006)
Post-dubstep is as nachtmusik as it comes. Few albums have captured the feeling of leaving the club at an ungodly hour, coming down off something and having to catch the night-bus home to somewhere in deepest south London as this feted outing from Burial, who imagined a drowning city. There’s even a track on it called Night Bus.

Kate Kellaway’s top five night fiction

Good Morning, Midnight
Jean Rhys (1939)
This captivating, memorable novel about loneliness takes its title from American poet Emily Dickinson’s lines: “Good morning, Midnight! I’m coming home, Day got tired of me – How could I of him?” Rhys understands in equal measure the glamour and squalor of long nights of the soul.

The Night Manager
John Le Carré (1993)
As the recent television series based on the novel showed, you might get away with murder on the night shift or murder might get away with you. It dramatises what can happen to one night manager propping up a Cairo hotel’s reception desk in the small hours.

Le Grand Meaulnes
Alain-Fournier (1913)
In this French classic, there is a party at night in the forest of Sologne where Le Grand Meaulnes, the schoolboy hero, first allows his life to become romantically complicated. The description of the lantern lit-forest is magical. An unforgettable encounter with the night.

The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark
Jill Tomlinson (1968)
Tomlinson’s indispensable picture book for children afraid of the dark turns nocturnal terrors inside out, shows how the scary things about night can become cosily manageable as Plop, the baby owl, learns to see the light about night (not “nasty” but “super”).

Night
David Harsent (2011)
A superb collection of frightening, enigmatic poems. Reading them is like setting out on a journey at night – your eyes take time to get used to the dark. He asks: “How did night come on like that? The sky is full/of birds, wingbeats in darkness becoming indelible.”

Rachel Cooke’s top five night nonfiction

Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight
James Attlee (2011)
In which the author travels the world, hoping to gaze on the moon unhindered by light pollution. En route, he offers up all sorts of strangenesses, among them the fact that Mussolini was terrified of moonbeams falling on his face as he slept.

Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams
Paul Martin (2010)
What is the night for if not for pulling the blankets over your head? Martin looks at the science behind sleep, an activity that, for some, is increasingly elusive. Yawning, narcolepsy, what happens to the severely sleep deprived: all are explained here.

Night
Al Alvarez (1996)
Essays in which Alvarez, best known for his study of suicide, The Savage God, leaves no aspect of the night unexamined. Along the way, he visits Las Vegas, where night and day are now the same thing, and rides out in a New York police patrol car.

Night Haunts
Sukhdev Sandhu (2010)
An unconventional meditation on London at night, and the various tribes that haunt it, from minicab drivers to office cleaners, from the Samaritans working a helpline to the “flushers” whose job it is to maintain the city’s sewers.

Foxes Unearthed: A Story of Love and Loathing in Modern Britain
Lucy Jones (2016)
Vulpes vulpes own the night, stalking city streets from dusk to dawn. In this book, Jones examines our complex relationship with this much persecuted and supposedly villainous animal, whose body parts the Tudors once used to cure migraine and toothache.