Nolan's Sweet Despair and Depravation

Do they make movies like this anymore? By this, I mean a tempered, seamless thriller that cares more about its characters than its contrived plot or abominable violence. By anymore, I mean since Hitchcock.

No, a dark gem like Insomnia surfaces rarely enough that each scene streams with electric current. It's a genre piece, so grounded in formula as to be almost predictable, yet sharp enough in vision to peer through the psychological shadows.

Directed by Memento upstart Cristopher Nolan, this film has a less cunning trick up its sleeve, but it comes early in the story and tensely flips the crime investigation plot in on itself. A remake of the 1997 Norwegian film of the same name, this version is set in Alaska, where the perpetual daylight robs the veteran sleuth Will Dormer (Al Pacino) of sleep. Plagued by consciousness, Dormer gradually loses control of what should be a standard case, and the camera's shots follow his descent into jittery, dazed disarray.

In the first 20 minutes, Pacino covers the ground of all three hours of Heat and then takes a nosedive into the kind of depths of Donnie Brasco and the Godfathers--places most any other actor couldn't drop a "Hoo-ah" in. In the meantime, as a bad guy of logic, clarity and restrained menace, Robin Williams enjoys a rare moment of emergence from his cloying career of cartoonery and rubber medical noses. Hoisted by these two performances, Insomnia unearths the bonds between guys, good and bad--slippery, psychic, erotic even--with desperate humanity.

Nolan displays a grasp for direction both instinctual and distinctive. His peers, led by the Coen brothers, have transformed detective and noir films into mere decadence and grotesquerie. Memento teetered on that edge of absurdity, but deftly--brilliantly, even--maneuvered away from cheap gimmickry, turning its noirish skin inside out and somehow making it look handsome. With Insomnia, on the other hand, he's found a project of old-fashioned storytelling. In just two films and as many years, Nolan has burst onto the scene to boost the crime thriller, as M. Night Shyamalan has done with the supernatural thriller, into something once again thrilling.