[In the following excerpt, Kauffmann argues that Twilight is an ineffective attempt to counter youth-driven Hollywood movies, characterizing Robert Benton and Russo's dialogue as “laboriously smart.”]

Twilight (Paramount) is indeed crepuscular. Robert Benton, who directed and cowrote it (with Richard Russo), clearly wanted to strike a blow for his film generation in this era of teenage pleasurings. So he devised a film to star Paul Newman and Gene Hackman and James Garner and (much younger but still not young) Susan Sarandon. In 1977, Benton did The Late Show, with Art Carney as an aging private eye who gets in trouble. This time Newman is the private eye, retired, who gets in trouble.

After a brief prologue in Mexico, the film takes place in Hollywood and environs. The chief setting is the mansion of Hackman, a former movie figure, and his wife, Sarandon, an ex-star. Newman, an old friend, lives over the garage. Asked by Hackman to deliver an envelope to a mysterious woman, Newman steps into a mess, in which he meets two old acquaintances, James Garner, another retired cop, and Stockard Channing, a former lover, still a cop.

The plot winds along, much like watching one of those TV chefs prepare a dish, a touch of this stock ingredient, a dash of that, including sex of course. But Benton never had any real purpose in mind other than to fling this geriatric gauntlet in the face of contemporary youth worship. Benton and Russo's screenplay has a lot of dialogue that is laboriously smart, and it leans heavily on mystery-novel characterization—that is, one character tic for each person. Example: a parole officer, when fatally shot, mumbles something about lifelong bad luck before expiring. The clever camera work of Piotr Sobocinski discloses a basic itch—to make a film noir in color: he ingeniously swathes some garish scenes in deep shadow.

Newman, now 73, is so welcome on the screen that we wish it were possible to give him a hug. He does perfectly all that he is asked to do, but aside from the fact that it's pleasant to watch Newman doing it, the role could have been played by many a less talented man. All the others are as good as they need to be. In the last moment Benton has Channing do something with Newman that is in doubtful taste; but perhaps he wanted to prove that, though he and some of his cast are well along, they are not over the hill.