For Fans of Michael Mann

Everyone cites the downtown shootout. The real achievement of 'Heat' is the diner scene: Al Pacino and Robert De Niro across a table, acknowledging each other with total honesty, and both walking away knowing how it ends. Mann had been building to that confrontation since 'Thief' and 'Manhunter'. The shootout is spectacle. The conversation is the film.

Before 'The Silence of the Lambs' made Hannibal Lecter a cultural fixture, Mann adapted Thomas Harris's 'Red Dragon' with Brian Cox playing Lecter and William Petersen as Will Graham. The film is quieter and stranger than its reputation suggests, a procedural built on the idea that understanding evil requires a particular and costly kind of empathy. It's the essential Mann statement on the price of looking too closely.

Shot on Sony HDV digital cameras in 2004, 'Collateral' turned a limitation into a style. The city becomes a character: Los Angeles at 2am, pixelated and alive, coyotes crossing freeways between fares. Tom Cruise playing a hitman as a kind of terrible life coach is career-best work. Mann was doing with digital what he'd been doing with 35mm for two decades: making the city itself feel morally compromised.

A true story about a whistleblower and a '60 Minutes' producer fighting the tobacco industry sounds like Oscar-bait procedural. Mann turns it into something closer to a paranoia thriller, a film about institutions grinding individuals down and what it costs to hold a line. Russell Crowe and Al Pacino give measured, unglamorous performances. It's the most genuinely angry film Mann has made.