They say money changes everything. While true, it might be easier to say that the dollar is dictator, ruling the world in a way that few can fully comprehend. From company entities censuring their employees tweets to marketing aimed at misleading and misdirecting the consumer, the climb to greater financial gain, especially within the corporate setting , has been the boon and bane of post-modern America. As a microcosm of this concept, as an indictment of all decisions made over coins, not concern, Michael Mann’s masterful The Insider shows how CBS News, and it’s bottom line dwelling lawyers, tried to stifled the story of tobacco industry whistleblower Dr. Jeffrey Wigand. The focus of a famous 60 Minutes expose, the film highlights all levels of the attack, turning the subject and his producer pal Lowell Bergman into targets of subterfuge and smear campaigns.

A man in one of those huge ‘50s cars, the kind you can use as a storage unit, drives to a motel. He sneaks up to a window, gazes in upon the fellow reclining wearily with a scar under his eye, draws a gun, and breaks in the door. They tussle for a few moments on the floor (conveyed by intercutting shots from a couple of listless angles) before they recognize each other as former police colleagues. Now that he’s been tracked down, the weary one (Paul Langton) tells his pursuer (Robert Shayne) his story in flashback.

He’d been investigating the murder of a man whose upper body was burned in a fireplace (as seen in a couple of quick gruesome shots) and, by interviewing one Patsy Flint (Tracey Roberts) and following leads to a snowy mountain retreat, he’d apprehended the curvaceous blonde Eden Lane (Barbara Payton), she of the blank, defeated air. What happens then is riddled with classic existential noir motifs: obsession, ambiguity, transgression, desperation, and above all a sense of paranoia and hopelessness.

Injustice happens every day. Innocent people are convicted within corrupt judicial systems while the guilty go free on technicalities and pleas. DNA exonerates some while highlighting how, in the blink of a brazen prosecutor’s eye, evidence can easily be tampered with, or outright destroyed. The case of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, Jr., also known as the West Memphis Three, sparked outraged around the world when documentary filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky stumbled upon their case, making it the focus of their fascinating trilogy of films found under the Paradise Lost title. Over the last two decades, their cause has become a landmark of grassroots activism.

There is nothing wrong with spectacle, as long as it delivers visually and can add a minor moment of meaningful subtext, or something like it—and even then, that’s not really a mandate. Indeed, a lot of potential popcorn entertainments get away with being nothing more than empty cinematic calories—a tasty treat, but rather hollow and unhealthy inside. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being vapid or indistinct. To paraphrase a character from Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, “empty spectacle is better than no spectacle, right?”

Alternate titles: Zsa Zsa Va Va Voom!; There Once Was a Lady From Venus

POSITIVES:

Pleasantly goofy in fully saturated color.

It’s fun to spot the stuff ripped off from other movies.

Giant spider appears to be a sofa cushion with legs sewn on.