Smoke Screen

The Insider (15) Selected cinemas

In the 20 years since Michael Mann made his cinema debut with Thief, a moody thriller released here as Violent Streets, his output has amounted to just six feature films, principally because he continues to work extensively in television, where he started out.

Mann's world is one in which women are consistently relegated as peripheral characters, allowing his feature films - which notably include Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans and Heat - to explore the philosophies and fates of male outsiders in society. The pivotal character of his sixth film, The Insider, began within the corporate establishment and became an outsider when matters of conscience impelled him to take on that establishment.

This absorbing, sleekly made and factually-based drama deals with Jeffrey Wigand, a scientist fired from his job as head of research and development at Brown & Williamson, one of the seven major tobacco corporations in America. The confidentiality clause in his severance agreement prevented him from discussing the company's activities, but with the encouragement of Lowell Bergman, a producer on the CBS current affairs TV series, 60 Minutes, he blew the whistle in 1995 - a year after the chief executives of the tobacco corporations swore before a congressional hearing that they did not believe nicotine to be addictive.

On camera, Wigand told 60 Minutes how Brown & Williamson manipulated the nicotine levels in cigarettes and that the additive, comaurin, was used after it was found to have caused cancer in rats. Then the pressure was piled on. Wigand was threatened with withdrawal of his medical benefits, he realised he was under surveillance, and his marriage began to fall apart. Furthermore, CBS, which at the time was the subject of a takeover bid by Westinghouse, got cold feet about airing Wigand's allegations.

The Insider is adapted by Michael Mann and Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth from a 24-page Vanity Fair article, The Man Who Knew Too Much by Marie Brenner. It creates an atmosphere of paranoia, distrust, betrayal and corporate corruption that invokes such superior conspiracy movies as The Parallax View, All the President's Men, Silkwood and JFK. In that context it shows how it was easier for two Washington Post reporters to bring down the president of the US than for the CBS network to take on the legal and financial might of the tobacco industry. (As it happened, The Wall Street Journal was much more willing to bite the bullet.)

The remarkable Australian actor Russell Crowe - whose early versatility in Proof, Romper Stomper and The Sum of Us drew Hollywood's attention and saw him cast so effectively in LA Confidential - fattened himself with cheeseburgers and bourbon and was made to look 20 years older to play the 52-year-old Wigand, and his riveting, expressive performance anchors the integrity of The Insider.

It is all the more unfortunate, then, that Michael Mann - as did Richard Attenborough in Cry Freedom - tips the balance towards the messenger rather than the message in the later stages of this sprawling movie. Wigand's character is sidelined and the film shifts its emphasis to idealise the television producer, Lowell Bergman, a friend of Mann and a product of 1960s radicalism, who is played as driven and zealous by Al Pacino. This imbalance further burdens the film with an excess of narrative baggage regarding the supposedly heroic Bergman.

In one of his best performances, Christopher Plummer plays the high-profile 60 Minutes presenter, Mike Wallace, now 81, who has been highly critical of the film's depiction of him as vain and concerned about his "legacy".

Hurlyburly (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Back in the early 1970s the American Film Theatre was set up to capture for posterity on film some high-calibre productions of significant stage plays. They included John Frankenheimer's film of The Ice- man Cometh with Lee Marvin, Fredric March and a terrific Robert Ryan; Joseph Losey's film of Brecht's Galileo with an over-the-top Topol; Arthur Hiller's The Man in the Glass Booth; and two featuring Alan Bates on superb form - Simon Gray's Butley, directed by Harold Pinter, and Lindsay Anderson's film of David Storey's In Celebration.

Despite the generally high standards of the acting, these were resolutely stagebound productions which, not surprisingly, found a much larger audience on television, where they belonged, than in the cinema. Anthony Drazan's belatedly arrived 1998 film of David Rabe's play Hurlyburly is in many respects a throwback to those American Film Theatre productions, the difference being that its expletive-littered dialogue ensures its television outings will be restricted to the more adventurous broadcasters such as Channel 4 and HBO.

In Rabe's adaptation of his own 1985 play, the locale of Hurlyburly is transposed from a living room in a Malibu condominium to a house in the Hollywood Hills which is the home of Eddie (Sean Penn), a casting director who snorts coke and smokes grass from morning to night. Staying with him is his cold, self-absorbed colleague, Mickey (Kevin Spacey), who is "taking a break" from his wife and children.

Chazz Palminteri plays their friend Phil, a desperate, self-deluded and out-of-work actor, with Garry Shandling from The Larry Sanders Show cast as a fast-talking producer who brings them an imperturbable teenage runaway (Anna Paquin from The Piano) as a "care package". She is treated no better than the other women in their lives - a film producer (Robin Wright Penn) involved with both Eddie and Mickey, and a drug-addicted stripper (Meg Ryan). To these four self-obsessed, misogynistic men, women are there to be traded, used and abused.

This visually dull, flatly directed film tortuously chronicles the fears, rivalries and addictions of these men, whose self-loathing is entirely understandable given that none of them has a single redeeming feature. Drazan's attempts to open out the film are perfunctory, putting the characters in cars or similarly confined locations as they spew out torrents of dialogue. The robust cast gives its all to the production, with Penn - who played the same role on stage under Rabe's direction in 1988 - giving a masterclass in Method acting, and Meg Ryan finally giving us a break from her sweet-as-pie persona.

Nevertheless, their best work cannot sustain interest in a drama which is already dated and pales in comparison with the equally loquacious but altogether more acute and cinematic reflections by David Mamet and Neil LaBute on masculine insecurities.

Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? (15) Selected cinemas

In this light, whimsical romantic comedy Michael Legge, the young Newry actor who played the 15-year-old Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes, plays the disco-obsessed Vince Smith who works as a trainee clerk in a law firm by day and falls for a colleague, Joanna (Laura Fraser), who transforms into a punk by night.

The setting is a North of England town in 1977, at the point of the collision between disco music and punk rock, which is epitomised in Vince's uncertain passage from idolatry of John Travolta to adorning his clothes with safety pins. In one of the movie's more amusing scenes Vince declares, without a hint of conviction, "I am an anarchist". The slender screenplay is equally naive.

The title of the film is virtually irrelevant given that Harold Smith, Vince's father, is relegated to secondary status. Played with dignity by Tom Courtenay, he is a quiet-spoken, retired man revealed to have unusual powers, from bending spoons to performing at a 100th birthday party where, instead of stopping a watch as a turn, he inadvertently and fatally stops three pacemakers. The wit and imagination exhibited by director Peter Hewitt in his earlier Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey and The Borrowers is under-employed in this goodnatured yarn which is all too obvious and uncertain of tone, and features period costumes and settings so overwrought that they distract from the slight storyline they are serving.

The cast also includes Lulu as Harold's adulterous wife, Stephen Fry as a pompous university lecturer, David Thewlis as a loudly dressed solicitor, and Charlie Hunnam (from Queer as Folk) as an aggressive punkster. And there are fleeting - and pointless - cameo appearances from Angela Rippon, Jan Leeming, Alan Whicker, Keith Chegwin and John Craven.