Avis des critiques

Night Moves at once follows the template of heist films such as Rififi—another film about a mostly unacquainted trio joining together for one big job before turning on each other—and remains strangely detached from it... Reichardt's patient, observational takes, from her shots of barren trees to an insert shot of a garbage dump, opt for verisimilitude at odds with the heist flick.

Night Moves is cruel and paranoid where Old Joy was tender and elegiac, but both movies (and really all her movies) are taking place in the latter's "falling-tear-shaped universe", where tragedy seems at once inevitable and entirely self-willed. It's a contradiction that could drive a person crazy, and in Night Moves – which is finally a very scary film – it absolutely does.

Unfortunately, despite best efforts from both Jesse Eisenberg and Dakota Fanning, the characters feel like they're working against their own internal logic. The twist ending belies too much of the well-crafted dynamic that came before it. Not only that, but the event that turns the narrative also undermines its social conviction. In trying to present a balanced view of the counter-argument, Reichardt sadly dismisses her own.

There is something undeniably retrograde about Reichardt's approach to an existential modern narrative with her deliberate pacing, notably quiet performances and careful camerawork. Although traces of Arthur Penn's original could, perhaps, be found here, for me Night Moves harkens back to the early road movies of Monte Hellman... The film builds to a conventionally (dare I say De Palma-esque) climactic sequence where Josh breaks into Dena's work after hours, intent on silencing her.

...These incidents—not to mention the final minutes leading up to the bombing itself—are breathtakingly tense and dominate the film's first half. If the second, which centers primarily on Josh's icy unraveling after the attack has a grave, unintended consequence, is less successful, what remains constant is Reichardt's ability to coolly present thorny sociopolitical and moral issues.

Night Moves rejects the insidious idea of "equal time": for every environmentally agitated player, there isn't a corresponding voice heard scoffing that climate change is a conspiracy foisted by Al Gore's profit-driven corporate friends or that it's all a product of sunspot expansion... Instead, Night Moves presents a sliding scale of activist involvement, commitment and oppositional pushback against the status quo and asks viewers to consider where they stand.

All this suspense trickery is done brilliantly, and Reichardt makes dead time, lack of incident, lack of apparent jeopardy all figure just as dramatically as the obvious teeth-gritting stuff: the muted ripples of Jeff Grace's score crank up the tension just as much as any Herrmann pastiche.

...The potentially unintended result of all this is that Reichardt's story, cowritten with frequent collaborator Jonathan Raymond, comes across as little more than a solemn near-parody of the radical left—that the film would play right into the hands of more conservative viewers matters less than that such broad strokes ultimately make for a rather flat character-based narrative.

A chronicler of the ebb and flow of the American spirit, she digs into the foundations of this modern lifestyle, pushing past surface qualities to analyze the deeper impulse toward independent action, imagining political rebellion as a reflection of emotional unease.

While the film's first hour is consistently tense, as Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard conspire to blow up an environmentally damaging dam, Reichardt then takes the storyline into trite, hackneyed territory, transforming Night Moves into a heavy-handed morality tale with the most banal of political messages.

They then go their separate ways only to confront a growing sense of futility and paranoia. From the slow, meticulously filmed preparation of the act to the tensely dilated period of doubt (the film's second and stronger half), an odd languid thriller emerges.

While it's interesting to see a film raise its most important questions and work through its most important themes only in the home stretch, the sense that half the feature has been set up for what is more or less a narrative punchline feels somewhat disingenuous. The aftermath in this case serves to prove too clean a point about the action which precedes it, a trick that simultaneously invalidates the film's baser genre pleasures while making its intellectual ambitions seem too schematic