Insomnia (2002)

As a director, I like Christopher Nolan, and the inventive ways he keeps finding to bend, stretch, and reverse time across his work. But as a writer, I don’t think he’s someone who has great intrinsic story sense of his own. The two movies where he was working with material that originated from others (Insomnia and The Prestige; I’m not counting Memento because it’s so vastly different from his brother’s short story that provided the premise) are a lot stronger on the character/story front than the ones he’s written on his own (like, say, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet), in that they feature flawed human characters in conflict with other flawed human characters (and/or with themselves). This one is a solid neo-noir remake of a 1997 Norwegian film, set in far-north Alaska during the time of year when the sun never sets, starring Al Pacino as a homicide detective and a cast-way-against-type Robin Williams as the murderer he’s hunting.