No one could have known that Criterion‘s new 4K restoration and release of Arthur Penn’s neo-noir classic Night Moves would serve as a de facto tribute to its star back when the disc was announced. The package came together in part to celebrate the film’s 50th anniversary and in part because, well, Night Moves is just one of those movies that deserves a Criterion release.
But when Hackman and his wife Betsy were discovered dead in their New Mexico home in late February of 2025, the Night Moves release took on new significance. It would become the first major restoration and re-release of Hackman’s work in the wake of his death, adding weight and meaning to an already deeply meaningful film in his filmography. That made revisiting the film when I received this disc a little more emotional, and I’m pleased to say that not only does the film hold up, but it shines in this new presentation.
Hackman is Harry Moseby, a slick, stubborn private investigator who’s resistant to new ways of doing things, and job offers that would take him to the more mundane corners of the job. Harry still likes the thrill of the hunt, of the shakedown, of puzzling out not just cases, but the people who inhabit those cases. So, he takes a job trying to hunt down an aging movie star’s free-spirited daughter (Melanie Griffith in her film debut) and chases her down to the Florida Keys. Before he leaves, though, his personal life hits rocky ground when he discovers his wife is having an affair.
The film can be seen in many ways as the completion of a trilogy of Hackman films all in the detective genre, following William Friedkin’s The French Connection and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. All three deal with a man, played by Hackman, who’s very good at doing one specific thing, and who resists a world that pushes him to adapt to something new, or break with the tightly controlled world he’s made for himself. The French Connection earned Hackman his first Oscar, while The Conversation earned him a Best Actor award from the National Board of Review. Both films are considered among the greatest of the 1970s, which leaves Night Moves slightly in the twin shadows of their mighty presence. But as anyone who’s seen the film knows, there’s something special about this one, and it’s preserved in the Criterion release.
As you might expect from a high-profile restoration like this, the grain of Penn’s film, the texture of it, is well-preserved, but what I was especially concerned about was how the 4K upgrade would treat the light and dark of cinematographer Bruce Surtees’ ’70s chiaroscuro. Thankfully, the darkness is still inky, mysterious, punctuated by pale fluorescent lights and, in one of the film’s most famous scenes, the eerie green glow from beneath a glass-bottomed fishing boat. Contrasted with the bright, golden hues of the Florida sun, it’s a masterful upscale that loses none of the ’70s grit that makes Night Moves so memorable. It’s also, crucially, an upscale that preserves the subtle nuances of Hackman’s performance. Harry is a complex character, a man who’s forced to stretch himself, find new emotional tethers as his life unravels, and he’s not an easy man to really know. Hackman, then, has to play him as both a solid private detective and as a man on the brink of some kind of new self-discovery, and he achieves this with remarkable emotional precision. It’s a movie built on knowing looks behind the wheels of cars and mournful sights into the humid Florida night, and this edition keeps all of that intact. Throw in a dynamite essay by Mark Harris, and a wonderful commentary by Matthew Asprey Gear that digs into the film’s influence and the battle over Harry’s character, and you’ve got a must-buy for noir fans.
Special Features Included in Criterion’s New 4K + Blu-ray Editions of Night Moves:
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- New audio commentary by Matthew Asprey Gear, author of Moseby Confidential
- New audio interview with actor Jennifer Warren
- Interview with director Arthur Penn from a 1975 episode of Cinema Showcase
- Interview with Penn from the 1995 documentary Arthur Penn: A Love Affair with Film
- The Day of the Director, a behind-the-scenes featurette
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Mark Harris
