Night Moves-a film noir in color that follows an L.A. detective from Hollywood to Florida in search of a runaway rich girl-was typically devalued at the time of its release. Andrew Sarris was one critic who wrote thoughtfully about Night Moves as a film that "submits seriously and nobly to its genre...The casualness with the plot may be '70s but the pain of the protagonist is pure '50s...Gene Hackman...is just about the best actor in pictures right now, and indisputably the most intense. In Night Moves he combines solidity, subtlety, and sensitivity as a knight in the dark, doomed to be checkmated by his own disarticulated desires...Hackman expresses a mortal involvement with the vibrantly vulnerable women of Night Moves...Indeed it is the man-woman stuff in (the film) which provides the key to the puzzle, and not the traditional complement of clues and red herrings...Hackman's Harry Moseby can be gross on occasion...and consistently obtuse, but he is never complacent or self-satisfied...He is his own case, his own foolish client served by a fatally confused detective." (Village Voice, 6/30/75)