I watched Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia before I watched the original. I was in my early twenties. I thought the film was fine and I moved on. It took me until Second Sight dropped this 4K edition to find out what fine had been covering up for twenty four years. I feel pretty bad about that. Not bad enough to not tell you to skip Nolan and start here, but bad.

Erik Skjoldbjærg’s 1997 original is a Norwegian thriller about a Swedish detective named Jonas Engström who goes to Tromsø to investigate a teenage girl’s murder and instead dismantles himself in daylight. Stellan Skarsgård plays Jonas. He is not a good man doing a bad thing. He is a man who was already doing bad things who then does a worse one, and the film is about watching him hold that together under a sun that will not go down.

The Sun Is the Monster Here

Skjoldbjærg called it “a reversed film noir with light instead of darkness as its dramatic force,” and that is exactly right, and also a polite way of saying the Arctic summer is doing something genuinely horrible to this movie. Tromsø in June means no night. No dark corner. No 3am where you can tell yourself it was a dream.

Cinematographer Erling Thurmann-Andersen shoots the whole thing overexposed and grey, and in the new 4K restoration that greyness lands like a fist. Every interior feels too bright. Every window is a problem. Jonas cannot sleep, cannot hide, cannot find a single hour that looks different from the one before it. That is the film’s horror, and it is more effective than it has any right to be.

What Skarsgård Actually Does

The performance does not announce itself. That is the whole thing. Skarsgård plays Jonas going still when he should flinch, pausing a half-beat too long before answering simple questions, watching every room he enters with the focus of a man who needs to know who in it already knows. He is calculating. He is also dissolving.

Roger Ebert compared the film to Dostoevsky when it opened stateside in 1998. The Crime and Punishment parallel is real, with one difference, Raskolnikov is tormented almost immediately. Jonas keeps choosing not to be. That is the colder read and the better film.

What Nolan Did With It

The 2002 remake moved everything to Alaska, added about 20 minutes, and made the detective a fundamentally decent man destroyed by circumstance. Al Pacino does the thing Pacino does. Robin Williams is genuinely unsettling in a way the film earns. Hilary Swank does more with her role than the script deserves. It is a competent Hollywood thriller and I have not thought about it since I watched it.

The key structural difference, in Nolan’s version, the detective dies. Some weight lifted. In the original, Jonas lives. Goes home. Carries it. That is the correct ending and the more disturbing one, and I will not call it a spoiler because you needed to know.

About This Release

Second Sight did not cut corners. The 4K restoration carries a director-approved HDR grade with Dolby Vision, and Thurmann-Andersen’s washed-out oppressive whites have never looked this punishing. The dual format edition puts the feature and bonus material on both the UHD and Blu-ray, which is a small detail that collectors notice and appreciate.

The physical package is a rigid slipcase with new art by Peter Strain, a 120-page book with essays from Jenn Adams, Mitchell Beaupre, Barry Forshaw, Francesco Massaccesi, Priscilla Page, and Travis Woods, and six collector art cards. The book reads like it was commissioned from people who actually watched the film. That sounds like a low bar. It is not.

What Is on the Discs

The audio commentary with Skjoldbjærg and co-writer Nikolaj Frobenius is the feature you will come back to. A director revisiting his debut nearly thirty years out has usually dropped the defensiveness and kept the honesty, and this one has that quality. Two new interviews accompany it: “Running on Instinct” with Skjoldbjærg, and “Falling Into It” with producer Petter J. Borgli. The producer interview fills in context the film itself never bothers to explain.

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas contributes a piece called “Private Prisons” that treats the film analytically without treating it as a sacred object. Three of Skjoldbjærg’s short films are included: Spor, Close to Home, and Near Winter. Watch those first if you want to know where Insomnia came from.

Buy It or Don’t

If you have never seen this film, the answer is yes. Full stop.

If you own the Criterion edition and you are doing upgrade math. The restoration is the definitive visual presentation and the commentary is new material unavailable anywhere else. Whether that moves the needle depends on you.

Insomnia is a Norwegian film about guilt dressed as a detective story. Jonas Engström did not need the midnight sun to lose his mind. He was already most of the way there.

Ronald LaPread, a co-founder and former bassist of the funk and soul group the Commodores, has died. He was 75.

“It is with a very heavy heart that I must announce that my father Ronald LaPread has passed,” LaPread’s daughter Soraya LaPread shared on her Instagram story. “If you know me you know my dad. I am devastated. A piece of me is gone from this world.”

Soraya did not share details about her father’s death, but the New Zealand Herald reported that the longtime resident died of a “sudden medical event.” The Commodores took to Instagram to share their condolences, writing that LaPread “will always be a Commodore.”

“Ronald was a phenomenal musician, an accomplished songwriter and a vital part of the Commodores’ sound and success. His contributions to our music and his friendship enriched our lives beyond measure. We were grateful to perform with him again last fall in New Zealand,” the Commodores shared on Instagram. “His legacy lives on through the music he helped create and the countless people he inspired.”

LaPread began playing with the Commodores in 1970 alongside Lionel Richie, William “WAK” King, Milan Williams and Thomas McClary while they were students at Tuskegee Institute. The band initially played shows around campus, performing covers and a handful of original songs.

Their manager Benny Ashburn spent his summer organizing shows for the Commodores on Martha’s Vineyard to test-market the band. In 1971, the group opened for the Jackson 5, helping them gain national exposure and leading them to sign with Motown Records in 1972.

The band released their debut album, “Machine Gun,” in 1974 and reached No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100. They released a quick succession of albums — “Caught in the Act,” “Movin’ On” and “Hot on the Tracks” — catapulting the band to mainstream success. LaPread played bass on the band’s most memorable songs, including “Easy,” “Three Times a Lady” and “Brick House,” the latter a song that LaPread insisted they put on the album.

“They say, ‘Oh man, it’s too Black.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute. I tell you what, I will give this song to the group. Just put it on the album.’ They say, ‘Okay,’ and they put ‘Brick House’ on the tape recorder,” LaPread explained in a video recently shared on his personal Instagram. “They went crazy. When you hear a hit song, it sends goosebumps all over your body. Before anything happens, you feel it, and that’s the history.”

After working on 11 albums with the band, LaPread left the Commodores in 1986 and moved to New Zealand. During his time with the Commodores, the group earned nine Grammy nominations and won an award for their song “Nightshift.”

LaPread joined the Commodores onstage last October during a tour stop in Auckland, New Zealand. On Instagram, the band called performing with LaPread the “highlight” of their shows in Australia and New Zealand.

In addition to his daughter, LaPread is survived by his wife, Farideh; and children Mark and Ronald Jr.

Surrealism is not my favorite film genre, but I will make a massive exception if it’s in the hands of Boots Riley. Not unlike his debut, Riley’s latest feature, I Love Boosters, is a weird, vibrant, funny, thoughtful, hopeful thesis on collective action and workers’ rights. At a time when satire is almost impossible (an episode of The Boys where the key villain announced that he was God aired just days after the president of the United States posted an AI meme of himself as Jesus), Riley manages to create something just bonkers enough actually feels like it has something to say, and is bright and colorful enough to demand your attention.

Corvette (Keke Palmer) is struggling to get where she wants to be in life, so poor that she’s squatting in a closed chicken restaurant. She and her friends, Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), steal clothes from the high-end boutique Metro and resell them at a lower price to people in their community. As part of their desire to get better at boosting, the three take jobs at Metro, hoping to figure out how to clear out an entire store.

But one day, while they are being reprimanded by Grayson for wearing last year’s Metro line from designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore), they leave the meeting to discover that someone has beaten them to emptying the store. They track down Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a Chinese woman who has a teleporting device that allows her to send the clothes back to China, where they are manufactured, hoping to force Christie to give them better wages and safer working conditions. They realize that they need to work together if they are going to see the changes they are striving for.

Also, LaKeith Stanfield plays a character who is so sexy, I can never watch this movie with my family.

At a time when so many trailers give away the entire movie, I Love Boosters is so wholly unique that if someone explained every plot point to you, you would still need to see it in order to fully grasp everything happening on screen. Like Corvette’s full-to-bursting pink tracksuit, this movie is stuffed with ideas and colors and characters, but it somehow all manages to stay together, creating an absolute feast for your eyes and ears.

The performances in this are absolutely spectacular from top to bottom. Keke Palmer sparkles, even as we see her running away from a literal ball of her problems. Demi Moore gets to play the opposite side of her role in The Substance, this time as the person trying to amass more wealth at the expense of those beneath her, primarily other women, and she tears it up. Don Cheadle is almost unrecognizable as Dr. Jack, a man Sade idolizes for his Friends Being Friendly pyramid scheme. Will Poulter is absolutely hilarious as Grayson, a Metro manager who has fully embraced everything Christie Smith is selling.

One thing you can glean from the trailer is the film’s overall look. Christie works in monochrome, so each location is filled with a single color. But even so, the colors are bright, not like the relentless desaturation that we are cursed with right now. Even when we are taken to the sweatshops in China, everything is bright and colorful. We are drenched in color and unique styles in I Love Boosters, but it is always singular, which is a fascinating way to show the uniformity that is often the hallmark of a hyper-capitalist society that is torn between conformity and individuality.

What makes this movie special is that in the midst of all of the hilarity, bright-but-monochromatic costuming, and a sex demon, there lies a deep philosophical examination of capitalism through the lens of dialectical materialism. This complex ideology isn’t dumbed down in any way, but is instead told to us through a magical device that is able to show us the world beneath the glitz and glamor of the fashion world. And sometimes what is underneath the literal skin of some of the people seeking to prop up the system as it is.

There are some issues with this film that don’t quite come together. The whole LaKeith Stanfield arc is very funny, but doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the movie. Taylour Paige is fantastic in her role, but there is more depth between Sade and Corvette, leaving less for Paige’s Mariah to do. But the messiness is so minor compared to the rest of I Love Boosters that it tends to get swept away in the maximalist filmscape that Riley has created.

Throughout the movie, Christie Smith has a lot to say about creating art and how her clothes allow people to become art themselves. At one point, someone tells her that people don’t want to be art, they want to make art. And that feels very much at the heart of this film. Most people want to create something beautiful that helps their community, but are constantly chased by the pressure to simply survive. To put a roof over your head, food on the table, clothes on your back. I Love Boosters says this dream is possible, but we might have to significantly change how we look at things and recognize that we’re stronger together than apart.

I Love Boosters is now in theaters.

Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.

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