Insomnia<br></br>Windtalkers<br></br>The Sweetest Thing<br></br>Pluto Nash<br></br>Scratch<br></br>Kin

Insomnia? Don't lose any sleep over it

The poster for Insomnia (15) announces that the film has not one, not two, but three Academy Award Winners in its starring roles. Al Pacino plays an LAPD detective who is flown up to Alaska with his partner (Martin Donovan) to investigate a murder. Hilary Swank is a local cop who idolises Pacino. And Robin Williams, cast against type, is an author who has beaten a teenage girl to death.

However many Oscars they've got, though, it's not the actors who are the main attraction, it's the director: Insomnia is the first film from Christopher Nolan since he made Memento, which was one of the most ingenious thrillers in years. And if his new film doesn't have a gimmick as stunning as Memento's reverse-chronology, it does have two gimmicks which aren't bad.

The first is that Insomnia is set in a region where, in the summer months, the sun never sets. Not only does this stop Pacino getting any sleep, it facilitates dream-like scenes in which the killer creeps through the deserted streets in the dead of night to carry out a ghastly errand ... and he's as visible as he would be at noon. The other gimmick is that Pacino makes a terrible error early in the case, and then hides the evidence – so he's simultaneously uncovering one crime and covering up another. To make matters more compromising, the only witness to his misdeed is the murderer he's tracking.

Neither device quite comes off. We don't get an acute sense of being in a land of the midnight sun, and the notion of Pacino being blackmailed by Williams doesn't bear much scrutiny. When you think about Memento after you've seen it, it seems more and more clever. When you think about Insomnia afterwards, the opposite happens.

None the less, it's a smart, sinister thriller, and a potent parable about how corruption can spread and stain like – to use the film's favourite image – dark blood soaking into white fibres. There are terrific performances too. Williams's moon-faced, unworldly persona makes his self-justifying villain all the more repellent, and Pacino's lack of sleep makes him increasingly haggard as the film goes on. The jagged peaks of the icy terrain are nothing compared to the ones on Pacino's face.

Once upon a time in the East, John Woo was the action director's action director – no one could mention him without using the word "balletic". But since he moved from Hong Kong to Hollywood, Woo has done his level best to expunge every trace of what made him unique, and with Windtalkers (18) he's finished the job. A Second World War movie set in the Pacific, the film is no more distinctive than Pearl Harbor or We Were Soldiers.

It crams in the clichés. The troops ponder what they're going to do "after this mess is over" (Christian Slater's character, we're told, is going to invent strawberry yoghurt); a redneck racist has his life saved by one of the native Americans he hates; a decorative nurse (Frances O'Connor) sends the hero (Nicolas Cage) letters which we hear in voice-over; and in countless comic-book battles, the good guys get shot in the leg and the bad guys get mown down by machine guns. As John Woo was born in China, it's disappointing that Windtalkers is even quicker than When We Were Soldiers and Pearl Harbor were to dismiss its oriental enemies as slant-eyed skittles.

What's supposed to make the film different is that it deals with Navajo code-talkers: native Americans whose own language was incorporated into a cipher that no one except a Navajo could translate. Their story is ripe for telling – but Woo doesn't tell it. He's more interested in a concocted idea that, in order to protect the code, the code-talkers' bodyguards were ordered to kill them before letting them fall into enemy hands. It's a fabrication which shoves the Navajos into the margins of their own history. In this film, their main contribution to the war effort was to give Cage a moral dilemma.

It's a vintage week for horribly misjudged Hollywood comedies. The Sweetest Thing (15), starring Cameron Diaz, is a botched rehash of There's Something About Mary. Pluto Nash (PG), starring Eddie Murphy, is a botched rehash of Matt Groening's Futurama. Also on release are Scratch (15), a documentary about hip-hop DJing, and Kin (15), a pedestrian TV drama about elephant poaching.

n.barber@independent.co.uk