Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975)

This film ends up working more similarly to a Rohmer film, which Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) ridicules (the ever-famous line: “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kinda like watching paint dry.”), than your typical detective film. A brilliant character study of a not-so brilliant private investigator. The actual case almost plays as a background to dissecting Moseby's character. Throughout the first hour and ten minutes we get to know Harry and his world and in the last thirty minutes we get to see his incredible failings. The film works as a mosaic (see bottom quote) of Harry's life, one of my favorite aspects of this film is exactly this. Almost no scene, or sequence, seems finished they all just blend together.

A wonderful article (Senses of Cinema) on the film here

On the use of Fresnel lens in the film:
"Those lenses produce a very wide-angle image, but they distort everything in sight. Sometimes they even sit atop the real. Sometimes they double it. Sometimes they get in the way of the real, which can be seen much more clearly without them. They prove that what you see isn’t necessarily what is in fact there, that you have to know what you’re looking at to understand what you’re seeing."

On the chess story (that Harry tells Paula, played by Jennifer Warren) and the multiple chess metaphors in the film:
"That is, most obviously, Harry’s story in the film. He sees what other people are doing but he hasn’t the least understanding what they’re really up to. He is going to make wrong moves and not see the right ones. He is going to lose and, if he survives, he is going to regret what happened as long as he lives."

On editing:
"The structure and style of Night Moves reflect Harry’s condition. Dialogue from one scene often leaks into the beginning of the next. Some scenes don’t end so much as they are displaced by the scene that follows. “Very early on,” Penn said, “I felt that the film needed abrupt, disjointed, almost convulsive editing, something that might suggest a nervous tic…. The film is a kind of mosaic.”