This film review is filler. Every day at The Daily Texan, we fill the space left empty by advertising.

Network television is the same way. You can count on the commercial breaks; it's the stuff in-between that networks have to worry about churning out. "Programming" costs you nothing. Why? Because networks and advertisers deal in viewers. They buy and sell your attentive eyes. You pay by watching.

In a perfect world, television news concerns itself with breaking hard-hitting stories (of course, in a perfect world, there are no such stories). In the real world, revenue determines content. As journalists, we are in the business of info-tainment. Sit back. Relax. Flick your Bic.

Cars blow up on impact? The public needs to know. Someone allegedly finds a syringe in a can of Pepsi? Front-page coverage. But what happens when someone tries to report that the highest-rated news program on television shelved a story because it might be bad for the network's bottom line?

The Insider, the movie that dares scrutinize the men who break the big stories, has a number of powerful figures sweating. With good reason.

Only once before in the history of cinema has a movie eschewed easy sensationalism and captured the tension, the excitement and the deceit of hardcore journalism as effectively as The Insider. That other film, All the President's Men, retraced Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein's steps in uncovering the truth behind the Watergate scandal, transforming one of the century's biggest news stories into legend in the process. Two decades later, Michael Mann gives our decade's greatest scandal the same compelling treatment.

In April 1994, the top executives of America's seven leading tobacco companies stood before Congress and swore that they had no evidence to suggest that cigarettes were addictive. In August 1995, an insider from Brown & Williamson consulted his conscience, weighed the risks and decided to share the other side of the story in an exclusive 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace. In September 1995, CBS decided not to air the segment because it might jeopardize a company merger with Westinghouse.

In a country where the legal realm has no jurisdiction over most corporate scandals, the responsibility falls on investigations initiated by the media. But who writes the rules that journalists follow?

With necessary fictionalization, The Insider springs from a Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner. According to Brenner, the tobacco expose originated with 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, who approached Jeffrey Wigand, "the man who knew too much," for an expert opinion on a cigarette story he was investigating. Quite by accident, he stumbled upon a source who could turn his story into something much more important. Wigand, recently fired as head of research and development at Brown and Williamson, had firsthand evidence that nicotine was an addictive, drug-like substance.

Though we hardly notice it, Mann constructs The Insider as an exercise in directed attention. At all times, he remains in close control of focus and framing, signaling which characters control certain scenes, where we should look, which details we should register. Mann never lolls about aimlessly. Working with director of photography Dante Spinotti, he maximizes the potential of every bit of film, both visually and in terms of furthering the narrative current. Their style, heightened by focal tricks and intense hand-held camerawork, pushes us steadily through 157 minutes of heavy material, constantly riling our interest and keeping us on course as our disgust with the situation grows more livid.

This type of forced-focus direction can be frustrating in the hands of an incompetent. Mann uses the technique to situate us within the film, demanding our involvement. The hairs on the back of our necks prickle as Wigand's daughter wakes him to ask, Poltergeist-style, "Who's that outside, daddy?" We sweat as even a casual trip to the driving range takes on the imposing threat of menace. We break out in goosebumps as characters launch into deep-rooted monologues about the things they firmly believe. All according to plan. Mann knows exactly what he's doing, and he guides us with expert precision.

In Heat, Mann couldn't seem to decide whether he was making an action movie or a character study between celluloid giants Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Heat's soul falters under distracting action sequences. With The Insider, he gets it right. Mann maintains the paranoid intrigue and breathless pacing of conspiracy movies like A Civil Action and The Firm, but there's no mistaking that we are watching a love affair of sorts between Lowell and Wigand, their relationship marked by the same degree of intimacy, those same furtive mannerisms.

To get the story, Lowell must court his source carefully. The information Wigand could reveal is dangerous. Blowing the whistle means betraying Wigand's confidentiality agreement to B&W, cheating on them and risking his severance package. Given the volatility of their conversations, Lowell and Wigand can only meet in anonymous hotel rooms and remote parking areas.

We spend the first half of the movie focused on Wigand as he works out his conflicts with uncovering Big Tobacco's Big Lie. Wigand goes on tape near the midway point, and the direction changes as Lowell is forced to let down a source who put his reputation, his family and even his life on the line for what he perceives as the public good.

Against Lowell's vehement objections, the decision-makers behind 60 Minutes -- lawyers and businessmen who supersede the journalists -- remove the controversial interview from the program because it threatens the impending buyout of CBS. To make things even murkier, CBS chairman Laurence Tisch happened to own Lorillard, the tobacco company which bought out B&W's cigarette interests as the story dropped.

A touchy scandal like this sets up a smorgasbord of juicy parts, filled here by a cast capable of the type of strong performances the roles require. Russell Crowe clearly understands that Dr. Wigand, for all his education and logic, is still limited by a short temper and brutish reactions. Al Pacino revels in Lowell's passion, giving an intense, dynamic performance as the optimistic journalist who sees the crippling of the system he believes in. Christopher Plummer's Mike Wallace is not just some nice man who shows up on your TV set every Sunday. He is proud to a flaw, a powerful and egotistical journalist celebrity who never underestimates his own importance.

Even the minor parts are strong, particularly Gina Gershon as ice queen Helen Caperelli, the wickedly composed lawyer bitch who deflates the story with brusque, precisely honed legalese. The only weak link I see in The Insider is Diane Venora as Liane, Wigand's wife. Liane appears only seldomly in trite scenes too hollow to suggest the consequences his actions have on his home life, perhaps the most important consideration in his decision.

The Insider sizzles with power, as big egos and ethics collide. Any issue could have eventually unleashed this type of furor within the boardrooms of business-minded network television. The nicotine controversy was important enough not to go away after it had been suppressed. CBS is really no different from the others; Disney controls ABC, General Electric owns NBC.

An arena like this lends itself to speechifying, with each of the principals getting his chance on the soapbox, backed by an operatic score that underscoring their freedom-of-the-press martyrdom with as little subtlely as possible. Wigand gets his cynical shot at the media: "I'm just a commodity. I could be anything to you ... worth putting between commercials." Lowell makes a rending plea for coverage: "Is it newsworthy? Yes. Are we going to air it? Of course not."

In one particularly delicious scene, Wallace realizes that even he is not invincible to the network's legal department and gives the smug Caperelli the reprimand she deserves. Continuing with those subtle yet effective camera tricks that control our gaze, Mann keeps the focus so shallow on Wallace in this scene we can hardly see the hyper-poised legal lackey flinch.

Moments like these, scenes in which we are viscerally tied up in the action, separate The Insider from its lightweight conspiracy movie roots. At times, Mann reverts to the genre's familiar heavy-handedness, as with a score that does more of our emotional work than necessary. The film emerges above any contrivances on the merits of its powerful subject and performances.

Despite the high ratings the 60 Minutes segment garnered when it finally aired (just think, all those advertising dollars well spent), millions of Americans are still missing the bottom line: The cigarette companies lied. They were, as Wigand puts it, "in a nicotine-delivery business," and that was the approach they had taken all along.

Ironically, the film's preview, running regularly during network television commercial breaks, efficiently achieves the same journalistic goal Lowell and Wallace aimed for with the original 60 Minutes piece. Alongside Schindler's List, Menace II Society and Saving Private Ryan, The Insider ranks as one of the decade's most significant films.