The Movie: The Insider is based on the true story of ex-tobacco executive Jeffrey Wigand and his attempts to get his stories of the lies of the tobacco industry out into the public. It stars Russell Crowe as Wigand, and Al Pacino as Lowell Bergman, a producer for the TV show 60 Minutes. You'd think that this might just be some big and fancy anti-smoking campaign, but it turns out that this movie really has nothing to do with smoking, and everything to do with corporate conspiracy and corruption at the highest level.

This is a pretty long movie, and the beginning is somewhat slow, in fact, nothing really happens for the first 45 minutes... but once you get past all of the backstory, hold on tight, because it's one crazy ride. The Insider becomes thoroughly engaging, with plenty of twists and turns, and is a great depiction of the struggle that these two men went through to get this story on the air, full of suspense and danger. Quite a good movie, I highly recommend it.

The DVD: The video transfer on this movie is fantastic, very clean, very clear, nearly grainless, and the color correction used on various parts of the film are nicely preserved. The audio is also pretty good, though nothing to write home about. Extras include a production featurette, a theatrical trailer, and some trailers for some other movies in case you fast forwarded through them at the beginning. There's also a little feature called "inside a scene" with text notes and the script with the actual scene... which ended up being pretty dumb.

Overall though, this is a fine presentation of a great movie definitely worth a rental.