but it’s definitely stuck in the 1970s stylistically a bit worse than The Long Goodbye or Chinatown. Not that that has to be bad but I do think those two contemporaries have aged better. Most other classic noirs earn their fatalism/nihilism better than NM does, too (the film certainly wasn’t very good at making me care about the Hackman character’s past, or his wife, though the line “Harry’s gonna make you eat that cat if you call him Harry one more time” is notable.)
It also took me about four annual viewings of the film to figure out who that even was in the plane at the end. (Hackman does well, but he usually does.)

I should walk back my earlier remark a bit, but when I picked up the DVD about a decade ago, NM only had like maybe 20 external reviews on IMDb, that’s what I’m really referring to.