Sleepless Night

A gripping little jolt of a movie, the French import Sleepless Night works almost completely in the realm of action-movie clichés—and makes it stick. It’s not the first film this year to arrive on American shores that finds success by almost literally stringing together trailer-worthy action scenes; that’s also one of the secrets of success for the mesmerizing martial-arts flick The Raid: Redemption. (Not surprisingly, U.S. remakes are in store for both.) Sleepless Night focuses on a cop (Tomer Sisley) who must deliver drugs he stole from two couriers back to their original source, a local kingpin who has kidnapped his son as collateral. When action movies keep it simple, the possibilities are endless, or at least the possibilities are Die Hard. In this case, it’s an energetic run through a French nightclub that may never surprise you, but it also never lets up.