Lawyers, Guns and Money: An Occasional Series on Movies, TV and Other Stories about Lawyers and the Law

The Insider (1999, Dir. Michael Mann) 

The Insider is not a movie about the law per se. Like most Michael Mann movies, it’s about men engaged in an operatic, high-stakes dance with each other and with the fates, coming together and splitting apart in a flurry of paradoxically macho sensitivity. It’s about the sacred bond between a journalist and his source, and the troubling divide between the noble work journalists do and the corporate interests of their employers. As such it’s one of the great journalism thrillers; there’s no heresy in mentioning The Insider in the same breath as All the President’s Men.