There's a scene midway through Michael Mann's new movie The Insider where would-be whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, played as a sombre obsessive– compulsive by Russell Crowe, is walking around a lawn, locked in internal debate as to whether or not he should testify that his former employers, tobacco giant Brown & Williamson, knowingly added cancer-causing chemicals to its cigarettes. Attorneys and police look on; the atmosphere is hushed; the tension excruciating. Eventually, Wigand walks up to his confidante, 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (played by Al Pacino), and says simply: “Let's go to court.”

This, in many ways, is a quintessential Michael Mann moment, as heartstopping as any death-defying Die Hard or Bond stunt. It's also a perfect illustration of the singular genre that Mann has carved out for himself in the cerebral action movie. True, he's as adept at choreographing bullet ballets as any number of John Woos, those who cowered and flinched through the protracted heist in Heat will testify to that. But the key scene in that movie was the verbal face-off between Robert De Niro's career criminal and Al Pacino's driven cop: two men painted into opposite but complementary corners by the force of their passions and their determination to pursue them, at whatever cost.

Mann has been called a “hard-boiled sensualist,” a sort of feng-shui'd Hemingway, and the term could equally apply to any of his anti-heroes, from James Caan's high-class burglar in 1981's Thief; through William Petersen's empathic detective in Manhunter, Mann's 1986 take on Thomas Harris's Red Dragon; to the cigarette-industry deep throat Wigand. Though, as Mann says in his throaty Chicago rasp, “Jeffrey has to be the most confused and unclear character I've ever worked with.”

The Insider is based on the real events sparked when Wigand, former head of research and development at Brown & Williamson, violated the confidentiality clause in his severance agreement by going public with his knowledge of the carcinogenic properties of B&W's products to Bergman; Bergman then put his devastating testimony on tape in an interview with 60 Minutes’ silky anchor Mike Wallace (played with brilliantined brio by Christopher Plummer).