Every Michael Mann Movie Ranked Worst To Best
2. The Insider (1999)
Written alongside Eric Roth, Michael Mann's ludicrously suspenseful drama The Insider follows real-life biochemist and whistleblower Jeffrey Wingard (Russell Crowe) as he lets the world know a tobacco company have been using chemicals to make their cigarettes more addictive.
Sure, it doesn't sound particularly hard-hitting or intense, but Mann's approach to the subject at hand and Crowe's career-best performance (really) makes every second of the 150-minute thriller absolutely enthralling.
Like all the best films about corruption and corporate betrayal, The Insider is equal parts intelligent, entertaining and enraging, allowing its protagonists - Wingard and Al Pacino's journalist Lowell Bergman - to become real-world heroes in a story much bigger than themselves.
Certainly one of the best films of 1999, and the one movie that should have actually won Russell Crowe an Oscar, The Insider is taut, brutal, unflinching and bursting with energy. But it's not quite Michael Mann's #1 film...