Arthur Penn is best known for his revolutionary BONNIE & CLYDE. NIGHT MOVES is a thriller/neo-noir that finds a way to use the actions of a genre to embody its main character.

Gene Hackman (THE CONVERSATION) plays former pro-football player turned private eye Harry Moseby. The character has an internal need to figure everything and everyone in his life out. However, for as much as he wants to believe he is in control of his investigation, the mystery is playing itself out around him with or without his involvement.

His wife Ellen (Susan Clark, PORKY’S) owns an antique shop and wants Harry to join a real agency. She’s also having an affair, which Harry discovers one night when he goes to meet up with her at a movie she is attending with friends. Instead of confronting her, he confronts her lover Marty Heller (Harris Yulin, TRAINING DAY) as if he needs to collect all the info before confronting the perpetrator.

A new case comes up involving a C-level fading actress named Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward, FAIL-SAFE), who seems to still be using her breast to land what she wants. Her 16-year-old daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith, WORKING GIRL) is missing. Harry search leads from movie mechanic Quentin (James Woods, SALVADOR) who once dated Delly to stunt pilot Marv Ellman (Anthony Costello), who took her away from the mechanic to veteran stunt man named Joey Ziegler (Ed Binns, THE VERDICT), who believes Delly is in Florida with her stepfather — charter pilot Tom Iverson (John Crawford, THE TOWERING INFERNO). In Florida, Moseby finds Delly living with Tom and Tom’s lover, Paula (Jennifer Warren, ICE CASTLES).

The most interesting part is that the film is more interested in Harry’s character than its plot. However, the inherent nature of the genre creates an uneasiness as we wait for the big twist to come. When it does come, everything Harry thinks about the situation and the people involved changes — then in the final scene everything changes yet again. Harry is trapped in an increasingly more complex mystery that leaves him floating aimlessly in the ocean of lies he may never unravel.

Hackman is perfect as Moseby — a man who thinks he knows more than others, but is as clueless as the rest of us. Warren doesn’t play the typical noir femme fatale, but she is the kind of character that we know will hold a key piece of the story’s puzzle. Things are left a bit open in the end, which is a perfect way to finish the story of a character who desperately wants all the answers to fall into place. NIGHT MOVES is a top-notched psychological thriller that presents a host of compelling characters, who make us wonder what secrets do we need to discover to understand what is really going on. But sometimes life isn’t that easy.