Based on truth, pulling no punches, brilliantly made top to bottom. Amazing.

Rating: 9/10 (5 March 2010)

The Insider (1999)
Wow, this is a searing, amazing tour-de-force. It comes across as fearless, and you wonder just how it got the okay to tell as much truth as it does. It slams the tobacco industry and CBS Corporation equally (though CBS News, as such, rises above). It creates a fluid, fast, intelligible, and moving story involving several key players. And it avoids sentiment, cliché, and shock, which is sort of amazing for a Hollywood film right there.
Add three amazing, central performances by men who take on their roles as if they needed to for their lives. First is Al Pacino, who often plays the righteous and indignant voice of justice, and he plays it with more justice here than ever. Then there is Russell Crowe, playing the "insider" himself, a tobacco industry chemist who spills the beans about the lies in the industry, and with real psychological subtlety. And then, in more of a surprise, Christopher Plummer plays one of Pacino's counterparts with perfect pitch.
Anthony Mann deserves a huge hand for his role pulling this together. He has a deft touch. He handles big material (spectacular stuff, really) with a steady beat of conviction, as if the point is not drama, but resolution. The music is superb, making clear that this is of course still a drama, and the editing, easily overlooked, creates a relentless but not distracting pace, leaving little things hanging just enough to keep us in suspense without obscuring the narrative.
I sound breathless in praise, and I suppose my one reservation is that the movie, since it is based on known facts (and uses real names throughout), lacks imagination. That's a bizarre comment, and not a complaint, exactly, but there is a sense when all is done that it was already known from the start. Getting there was amazing, but the result is a heightened version of what we know and see all the time in the news and in the corporate worlds. And sometimes elements are repeated too often (the video tape), so you can see a trimmed down version having even more impact.
But let me go back to being breathless. This is an overlooked, wonderful movie. That it holds interest so well after a decade is only proof that it might continue to work as a movie, as a drama, long after the events are in textbooks, and CBS is bought up by someone else. And so the world turns. Check this out. You won't be disappointed.