The Informant!

The real story is stranger than the film. Mark Whitacre was president of the biochemicals division at Archer Daniels Midland and informed the FBI about the company's international lysine price-fixing scheme. Between 1992 and 1995 he secretly recorded meetings and became the highest-ranking corporate whistleblower in American history. Throughout the same period he was embezzling close to nine million dollars from the company. The outcome: three senior ADM executives went to federal prison and the company paid a hundred million dollars, the largest antitrust fine against an American corporation to that date. Whitacre went to prison too. Steven Soderbergh shot this not as a thriller but as black comedy. Matt Damon put on weight and wore a moustache and a hairpiece; the voice-over is full of entirely unrelated thoughts from inside Whitacre's head, which gives away his unreliability well before the plot does. Scott Z. Burns wrote the screenplay from the 2000 book by former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who is also credited as a producer. Who it is for: viewers who like corporate crime and the unreliable narrator handled in a comic register. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a clear hero. Whitacre lies from start to finish and the film does not correct him.