“I saw a Rohmer film once,” said Gene Hackman in Arthur Penn’s classic mid-’70s neo-noir Night Moves. “It was kind of like watching paint dry.”

Funny as it is, this line is the cheapest of cheap shots — in part because Penn’s movie, starring the moody, recalcitrant Hackman as Detective Harry Moseby, is itself so thoroughly, indulgently entertaining when set beside the chaste, high-minded films of French filmmaker Eric Rohmer (1920-2010). It isn’t so much that what Hackman says is right but that it sounds right.