Insomnia

Dormer has a weariness that Pacino wears perfectly, always finding some new depth to his exhaustion and despair without ever being a sleepy presence on screen.

Insomnia is not so much about the murder mystery as it is about Will's internal struggle with what's right and what's possibly okay.

The film represents a triumph of atmosphere over a none-too-mysterious mystery. Which is to say that Nolan makes you feel the end-of-the-earth bleakness of his setting, makes you feel the way it can discombobulate people once they internalize it.

With a run-of-the-mill bad-guy actor playing chief suspect Walter Finch, the movie might have tipped too far Pacino's way. But Robin Williams is a shockingly effective counterweight.

Scene by scene, screenwriter Hillary Seitz follows director Erik Skjoldbjaerg's original closely, but this remake deepens and improves upon the Norwegian film by giving Dormer a more complex relationship with Eckhart.

Nolan uses visual pyrotechnics to pump up the tension and add to Pacino's sense of disorientation, but the feeling he evokes isn't as forlorn, creepy, or ambiguous as in the original (though the mountain wilderness is just as forbidding).

...a methodically-paced yet increasingly absorbing drama...

The only remake Nolan has ever done and the only time he’s never written his own script—Insomnia was his first step in a studio system—this feels the least like a Nolan film, at least what we would come to expect of it based on what came after and before.

An electric police procedural drenched in the terror of sleeplessness, Nolan’s remake of the 1990s Norwegian thriller is perhaps his most underrated film as it shows him coming into his own with his command of mood and atmosphere.

Insomnia may be an underrated Christopher Nolan film but Al Pacino and Robin Williams elevate it to the next level and make audiences forget that it's an English-language remake.