Insomnia (2002)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Two Los Angeles homicide detectives are dispatched to a northern town where the sun doesn't set to investigate the methodical murder of a local teen.
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20 films that influenced Insomnia
What critics say influenced Insomnia
Actually, he kind of resembles an older version of his character in "The World According to Garp." Williams does do a good job of projecting Walter's main theme - that he doesn't believe he's evil and he doesn't care about his actions.
However, it's also very reminiscent of the recurring flashback sequence in 1987's Angel Heart.
The climax is unbelievably clunky in construction, yet it's so explosively edited, with split-second close-ups that recall the finale of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), that I forgot my disappointment until it had ended—when my disappointment returned, but not too insistently.
"Insomnia" would fit snugly into a triple-bill alongside Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation" and Pacino's "Dog Day Afternoon."
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I can think of no other contemporary director who is actually making the kinds of films Hitchcock would be making now, as opposed to slavishly imitating this or that camera angle from “Strangers on a Train” in the hope of lending significance to some piece of perfunctory and insincere crap.
With young actresses like Hilary Swank and Maura Tierney (as the motel clerk) he is fatherly and protective; he gets a weird vibe going with Katharine Isabelle, of last year's superb Canadian horror film Ginger Snaps, as the dead girl's best friend (blink and you'll miss Isabelle's costar in that film, Emily Perkins, delivering the eulogy).
Think of him as Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, only leaner, more delicate in features and infinitely more articulate.
Those images, in fact, reminded me of the shots of endless Rocky Mountain forest at the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” a not-too-distant cousin to this film.
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Martin Scorsese tried the same sort of exercise when he revamped the pulpy 1962 shocker "Cape Fear" a decade ago, but Nolan's film is superior, reaching the tense peaks that few suspense films have scaled since "The Silence of the Lambs."
Not since "Marathon Man" has an actor so convincingly portrayed extreme exhaustion.