Review from The Onion AV Club by Scott Tobias:

As one of the first commercially regarded features to emerge from London's gay underground in the '70s, Ron Peck and Paul Hallam's remarkable 1978 film Nighthawks had to tread a thin line between challenging public misconceptions and presenting an accurate portrait of the gay community. Nighthawks sidesteps these pitfalls by focusing on the double life of Jim (Ken Robertson), a closeted geography teacher, as he navigates his way through the straight and gay worlds. At night, he descends on the few gay bars and discos, nursing a pint of beer while anxiously scanning the dance floor until someone catches his eye. Since bars and discos, by nature, encourage one-night stands over long-term relationships, Robertson's frequent sexual encounters become routine and dissatisfying.

With intimacy and compassion, Peck and Hallam explore the romantic dilemmas of marginalization, using a minuscule budget and few locations to show the suffocating limits of homosexual life.


Review from Film Vault by Ray Pride:

When it was released in 1979, Nighthawks, directed by Ron Peck and Paul Hallam, was a progenitor of the many, many coming-out tales that have been made by young gay directors in the time since. Almost twenty years on, there's still strength in his story of Jim, a closeted man (Ken Robertson) who goes about a mundane workaday life as a London schoolteacher, but haunts gay bars and discos by night. The low-key, grimy naturalism of his life says: Look at me - my life is as lonely as yours. But what is even more impressive is Peck and Hallam's depiction of cruising - of the lingering look of desire. The camera roams the expanses of a disco in extended takes, forcing – allowing - the viewer to choose what or whom to watch, just as Jim does. The repetition of scenes becomes hypnotic, and without ever growing didactic, the camera's gaze compellingly dramatizes the simple act of sight, of looking as a routine of consumption. Do we consume those around us in the manner that we consume images? It is a question with graver implications than when Nighthawks was first released.



“...very moving. It should be widely seen and discussed”
-- The Guardian

“The first film to delve with anything resembling realism into London gay life”
-- Financial Times