![]() That doesn’t exactly describe her boyfriend Randy (Jonathan Jackson), but considering his temper he seems the most likely suspect.ĭormer gets a break when Kay’s backpack is discovered. He thinks the killer isn’t some hot head, but someone who acts cool under pressure. Dormer is a master of his craft, building a character profile simply by examining the body. Meanwhile, the investigation into the death of 17-year-old Kay Connell proceeds smoothly. ![]() This is concerning for Dormer, both because criminals might get set free and because he might be implicated. He’s deeply skeptical of an ongoing Internal Affairs investigation, especially as Hap tells Dormer that he’s being pressed for information and that he’s going to talk in exchange for immunity. The plot is twisty, but the interactions between Pacino and Williams are the real draw. But between him and Hap, his career isn’t going so well. Los Angeles is known for its sunshine, but in Nightmute the sun never sets.ĭormer is something of a cop celebrity in Alaska, with young Detective Ellie Burr (Hillary Swank) having studied his past cases like a fan of Pacino’s would watch The Godfather. Nolan wanted to drench a couple of LA cops in irony. ![]() But if that seems weak, don’t worry about it. Why are a couple of LA cops solving a rural Alaskan crime? Technically, because the police chief there is an old friend of Dormer’s. But they’re on assignment in the middle-of-nowhere, Alaska, officially known as Nightmute. The movie is pure neo-noir, with Dormer and his partner Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan) even coming from the home of the genre, Los Angeles. Insomnia is no different, pitting Detective Will Dormer (Al Pacino) against creepy crime fiction author Walter Finch (Williams). Those two movies are intimate stories, based around cat-and-mouse games. Here, he tames the impulse to be too opaque, keeping the audience oriented and informed throughout a consistently absorbing narrative that demands close attention but rewards that commitment with a movie that evolves from a historical and biographical deep dive to a meditation on moral injury and, in its final hour, to a thoroughly gripping psycho-political thriller.Like Nolan’s previous movies, Following and Memento, Insomnia uses crime to explore human nature. With movies like “Inception,” “Interstellar” and “Tenet,” Nolan has enjoyed keeping the audience one step behind, world-building across the space-time continuum in ways that probably only Oppenheimer himself could understand. Luckily, Nolan - who wrote the script, adapted from Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book “ American Prometheus” - knows his way around a scrambled chronology. There’s a lot of information to keep track of in “Oppenheimer.” Spanning four decades, during which the title character goes from protégé to prophet to pariah, the movie is a jumble of time frames, narrative arcs, and characters who move in and out of the subject’s life in sometimes shocking but always intriguing ways. ![]() As Oppenheimer makes a name for himself in quantum mechanics - he’s written a widely circulated paper on molecules - we also meet the man who will become his chief antagonist: Lewis Strauss, the businessman and philanthropist who recruited Oppenheimer to head the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and who would ultimately bring Oppenheimer low after their work together on the U.S. “Oppenheimer” begins in medias res - in the middle of things, the “things” being the title character’s whirlwind academic career, which took him from England to Germany and Amsterdam, then finally to Caltech and Berkeley. ![]() And he’s not always sympathetic: We meet him as a promising student in theoretical physics who gets back at a condescending tutor at Cambridge by poisoning an apple on his desk. Not only was he a man of seductively gnarly complications, but he moved through the 20th century as an avatar of its most deeply held aspirations and anxieties. It’s easy to see why Nolan was attracted to Oppenheimer as a protagonist. ![]()
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