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On the edge of exposing one of the decade's most incendiary public health issues, "60 Minutes" television producer Lowell Bergman must convince former tobacco industry insider Dr. Jeffrey Wigand to reveal the truth about the practices of cigarette companies, although the consequences to his career and family may be ruinous.

Was a bit worried that this film might just be anti-tobacco propaganda, but it is much more than this. Russell Crowe plays a rather volatile chemist, who having been lured to work for the fat salary offered by a tobacco company, becomes troubled by the ethics of his work, and gets himself sacked. Al Pacino plays the producer of a US TV show reporting on current affairs, who meets the troubled scientist by chance and realises he has something to say about his former employer, but is afraid to do so. The film explores the relationship, which develops, between the two men, each struggling to maintain their professional integrity, as scientist and journalist, in the face of the corporate power, which seeks to silence them. Both actors excel in parts tailor-made for them and the result is a satisfying and thought-provoking film.

As revisionist history, Michael Mann's intelligent docudrama The Insider is a simmering brew of altered facts and dramatic license. In a broader perspective, however, the film (co-written with Forrest Gump Oscar-winner Eric Roth) is effectively accurate as an engrossing study of ethics in the corruptible industries of tobacco and broadcast journalism. On one side, there is Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), the former tobacco scientist who violated contractual agreements to expose Brown & Williamson's inclusion of addictive ingredients in cigarettes, casting himself into a vortex of moral dilemma. On the other side is 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), whose struggle to report Wigand's story puts him at odds with veteran correspondent Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) and senior executives at CBS News.

As the urgency of the story increases, so does the film's palpable sense of paranoia, inviting favourable comparison to All the President's Men. While Pacino downplays the theatrical excess that plagued him in previous roles, Crowe is superb as a man who retains his tortured integrity at great personal cost. The Insider is two movies--a cover-up thriller and a drama about journalistic ethics--that combine to embrace the noble values personified by Wigand and Bergman. Even if the details aren't always precise (as Mike Wallace and others protested prior to the film's release), the film adheres to a higher truth that was so blatantly violated by tobacco executives seen in an oft-repeated video clip, lying under oath in the service of greed. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

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