Night Moves

I wasn't drawn in. I almost cared more about whether the main character, a private eye, would find his way back to his cheating wife, a minor subplot here, than whether he would bring back to his stepmother her wandering stepdaughter from Florida, where things really drag on lethargically and where I was only entertained by the fine sexual tension between the detective and the blonde femme fatale. That's the first hour, then from a certain point onwards it picks up some momentum and the corpses pile up, including the final climactic ten minutes, which in its overwroughtness feels more like a bit of B-movie drama than a very slowly told story up to that point. Gene Hackman is great here, as always, with a young Melanie Griffith almost unrecognisable. And it has a fine jazzy musical score at times, but .... I was expecting something better from the seasoned Arthur Penn. (16.09.2024)

A slow and uninteresting film that feels twice as long as it is. The characters couldn't draw me into their world, and I didn't care about them at all. A good film needs more than a top actor in the lead role... Overall impression: 40%. (27.08.2013)

Gene Hackman is very good in this film. On one hand - especially at the beginning - you get the feeling that he's a classic tough hero, but he really isn’t that tough, and he's definitely not Dirty Harry. He's got his problems and he's going to get into trouble. The storyline is not bad either and the finale is very well shot. (22.08.2017)