“Night Moves, (which follows an L.A. detective from Hollywood to Florida in search of a runaway rich girl), seems more questionably allied to the Western than other Arthur Penn pictures (The Left Handed Gun, Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man, The Chase, The Missouri Breaks). It is easier to regard it as a film noir in color, filled with such modern elements as movie stuntmen, a wild girl from L.A., Florida smuggling, a football player-private eye and pained memories of the death of Kennedy. On the other hand, Night Moves covers the two coasts of America--traveling is its metaphor for finding out; the stuntmen are self-conscious cowboys, and detective Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) a failed sheriff-figure who can no longer solve the riddles. Above all, the film is a model of America, not just of a hero's despair: just as in his obvious Westerns, Penn has used a certain narrative structure to examine the nation.
“As Terence Butler wrote in an article on Penn in Movie, No. 26: ‘For Harry Moseby read not just Harry Moses, but Harry Nixon. It is as if Penn has come to believe that the problem is not the Billy the Kids...but the Pat Garretts, who...can murder out of some perverted sense of duty when the time comes.' And so Night Moves deserves attention as a neo-Western in which the male searcher embodies the fallible arrogance of the modern leader. Through this allegory, Penn manages to make recent American experience sombre and instructive.” David Thomson