One of the best films of the year.

Rating: Null/10 (19 December 2000)

Michael Mann's "The Insider" is a terrific film, maybe the best of 1999. It certainly features the performance of the year, from Russell Crowe as embattled tobacco industry insider Jeffrey Wigand, and I thought that Oscar should have also tapped Christopher Plummer for his beautifully detailed cameo as Mike Wallace. Mann's reputation as a master filmmaker is enhanced by his work here, which is tight, uncompromising and brilliantly controlled.
The almost painterly compositions of the shots and the dogged, unstoppable editing rhythms make the movie fly by even as sequences linger; a tense encounter on a driving range, an intruder in Wigand's garden, a hotel room wall that melts into a memory.
Mann's use of point-of-view in the shots is consistent and phenomenally effective: almost every scene shows how subjective perspective is easily opened up by the introduction of peripheral material. the script, by the Oscar-winning writer Eric Roth and Mann himself, is crackling and taut and never once steps wrong. There's no grandstanding dialogue or poetic turns of phrase. It's just slice-of life, and the characters are all smart and sympathetic or stupid and hateful because that's who they are, not because
the plot needs a kick in the impetus. The score is achingly lovely and also somehow completely distancing and alienating. If you haven't seen The Insider, do so.