Regine, a psychologically fragile young woman, is hiding away in the city, far from the dark and forbidding countryside of her traumatic childhood. She's struggling to construct the loving family she never had, and to rise above the events of the past above all, the disastrous home birth of her brother Isaac, which led to her mother's insanity and Isaac's apparent death. But the city is tense and hostile, and contains its own threats. An abusive relationship with the controlling psychiatrist who's treating her mother is already blighting Regine's life when the brutal murder of her grandmother raises a crucial question is Isaac still alive, and looking for revenge against a family which he feels has rejected him Driven to heal the wounds of the past and to reunite her family by connecting with the brother she's never met, Regine must return to the site of her previous traumas and confront the true source of her family's guilt. It could make sense of her life - or throw it into ...
Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), a worn-out private detective, is hired to look for a 16-year-old girl who has run away from the luxury home of her mother, formerly a small-time actress in Los Angeles. The more the weary cynic tries to get under the surface of the seemingly simple case, the harder it is for him to find his bearings among the lies and deceptions that surround him. Eight years after the key New Hollywood film Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman reunited to collaborate on what was to become one of the most undervalued films of the decade. Like Polanski in Chinatown or Altman in The Long Goodbye, in his revisionist film noir, Penn also allows the 1940s classic genre to pervade the complex reality of the 1970s. The feelings of bitterness and emptiness in the modern Chandleresque protagonist originate not only in the “public” sphere of the strange, increasingly convoluted case, but in his private life as well (boyhood trauma, a broken marriage). As Moseby remarks of a sporting event, “nobody’s winning … one side is just losing slower than the other.”