Dominik Moll’s compelling procedural is closer in tone to the Hughes brothers’ From Hell or David Fincher’s Zodiac, albeit without the celebrity of those cases.

[Night] assumes the perspective of the police without exempting them from its damning canvas; their cool investigative professionalism (and, in a sense, the film’s) registers as its own kind of complicity in a wretched, man’s-world status quo.

Somewhere beneath its enthralling depiction of obsessive police work is a cry from the heart against a broken system.

It’s shocking that its combination of enervation and smugness has been met with such uncritical acceptance. I can’t help thinking that critics are responding to the grafted-on sexual politics rather than to the film itself.