Shoot the Moon

Despite its flaws, despite its gaps, despite two key scenes that are dreadfully wrong, Shoot the Moon contains a raw emotional power of the sort we rarely see in domestic dramas.

This unapologetically grown-up movie about separating is perhaps the most revealing American movie of its era. Though the director, Alan Parker, doesn't do anything innovative in technique, it's a modern movie in terms of its consciousness.

Shoot the Moon leaves you with more than fresh respect for Parker and Keaton. It also suggests that American family life has just begun to be depicted with true candor and sensitivity on the contemporary screen. [19 Feb 1982, p.D1]

Shoot the Moon is Kramer vs. Kramer without the sentiment, a hard view of post-marital strife in Marin County, Calif. [11 Jan 1982]

The non-judgmental state, in which the wrecking of a family is treated like a natural disaster for which there is no human responsibity or possiblity of control, is also true to the spirit of the society the film depicts. But it makes the film, like the marriage itself, seem irritatingly thoughtless. [19 Feb 1982, p.4]

Even Parker's direction, with its unerring sense of pace, cannot disguise an awkwardly episodic narrative which just cannot find a sense of an ending.

Finney and Keaton each have their heavy dramatic moments, but there is nothing in writer Bo Goldman's script that hasn't been seen and heard in a thousand other films.