Private eye Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is dedicated to his job, but his dedication does not make him happy or powerful in his personal life, and his wife (Susan Clark) is cheating on him. Aging actress Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) hires Harry to find her trust-funded daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith), distracting Harry from his marital problems as he tracks the lascivious runaway teen to Florida. In the Keys, Harry has an affair of his own with Paula (Jennifer Warren), and he succeeds in
locating Delly, even as he learns that finding her is only the beginning of a much larger case. As the "accidental" deaths multiply, Harry discovers that everyone has his or her own motives and that he cannot do much to stem the tide of deep-seated depravity. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
Night Moves is a paradox: a suspenseless suspenser, very well cast with players who lend sustained interest to largely synthetic theatrical characters.
Arthur Penn's Night Moves is about an old-fashioned private eye who says and does all the expected things while surrounded by a plot he completely fails to understand.
An elegant conundrum, a private-eye film that has its full share of duplicity, violence, and bizarre revelation, but whose mind keeps straying from questions of pure narrative to those of the hero's psyche.
An exceptional neo-noir...In Penn's short-lived time among Hollywood's elite directors, Night Moves is perhaps his most assured film next to Bonnie and Clyde.
Hackman...is as watchable as ever, and for him alone and a maybe certain raw and realistic brutality, the movie continues to pass a fascinating ninety-odd minutes.
Everything is low key about this film, until the last thirty minutes when the plot violently unravels. As other great neo noirs of its type, it confronts a man with old fashioned morals and mentality with hypocrite modern day world. Gene Hackman gives another stelar performance.
An interesting neo-noir thriller but that is not near the masterpiece some critics make it be. Doesn't hold a candle to Arthur Penn's real masterpiece, "Bonnie and Clyde"
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