Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
During the Great Depression, a con man finds himself saddled with a young girl who may or may not be his daughter, and the two forge an unlikely partnership.
Paper Moon is elevated above all by its performances — Ryan O'Neal and Tatum O'Neal (who won the Oscar) share an electric, naturalistic chemistry that anchors the film. László Kovács's gorgeous black-and-white cinematography evokes the Depression-era Midwest with stunning authenticity and visual poetry, a deliberate stylistic choice that pays off beautifully. The plot is a breezy episodic road-trip con-artist tale — charming and well-executed but structurally loose, more a series of vignettes than a tightly constructed narrative. Novelty is solid but not exceptional; the film perfects a particular kind of Depression-era picaresque but doesn't radically reinvent the genre. The ending is warm and satisfying without being revelatory, leaving the central ambiguity (is he her father?) productively unresolved but feeling slightly undercooked as a dramatic conclusion.