Night Moves



Night Moves is a 2013 American drama film directed by Kelly Reichardt and written by Kelly Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond. It was shown in the main competition section of the 70th Venice International Film Festival and at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. Film stars Dakota Fanning, Jesse Eisenberg, Peter Sarsgaard, Alia Shawkat and James LeGros.

In the Pacific Northwest, a pair of driven environmentalists (a brooding Jesse Eisenberg and, in her most nuanced screen performance to date, Dakota Fanning) partner with a disillusioned former Marine with an extensive knowledge of explosives, played as a louche outsider by Peter Sarsgaard. Together, the trio plot to detonate a bomb and destroy a dam. Their act of ecological defiance has consequences both sinister and unintended. This is the basic plot of Night Moves, the new film by writer, director, and editor Kelly Reichardt. Audience members who saw her prior films, including Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, know to expect a slow-paced film, though this picture, both in its characterizations and its slowly burning, but very potent suspense, is far and away her most accessible release to date. The hypnotic first half is defined by anticipation and closely observed procedure, building to the central nocturnal bombing sequence, which is as armrest-clenching intense as cinema's most memorable heists. The second is more challenging and complicated as the ensemble separates and become submerged in their own versions of ethical confusion and despair, but I still remained firmly in the film's unusual grip. Reichardt as always excels at capturing the rhythm and texture of the environments and lives upon which she trains her camera. In Night Moves, she invites us to absorb the characters and their deeply felt, ultimately dangerous desire for a sustainable agrarian counterculture from an intimate, yet also clarifying and detached vantage point.

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