Based on a true story, Mann’s conspiracy thriller tracks the attempts of a former tobacco employee to blow the whistle on the tobacco manufacturers’complicity in nicotine addiction and their lies before Congress. Unrecognisable from his current GLADIATOR role, Crowe gives the performanceof his life as the bumbling, reluctant hero who teams up with an investigative television journalist (Pacino) only to find his revelations blocked and his life changed forever. Made with Mann’s characteristic cinematic bravura, THE INSIDER is as complex and uncompromising as it is engaging and enthralling (Sight and Sound).