John Landis’s depressive thriller has an original premise: Jeff Goldblum is an angst-ridden, insomniac Los Angeleno who takes a midnight trip to the airport to fill his empty hours. In the parking lot he saves a beautiful woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) from a gang of Iranian gunmen and embarks on a series of adventures that take him across the nighttime city, none of which suffices to shake him out of the stupor of sleeplessness. In the early scenes, Landis and Goldblum work hard to make the character’s depression dramatically real, and this infusion of gravity in a generally weightless genre brings a new meaning to the standard action scenes. But the idea vanishes around the midway mark—at about the point when the sun comes up—and the balance of the film is thin and familiar. With Richard Farnsworth, Kathryn Harrold, Vera Miles, Clu Gulager, Dan Aykroyd, David Bowie, and cameo appearances by a couple dozen movie directors (1985).