108m; U.S.

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Cast: Matt Damon, Tony Hale and Patton Oswalt

Synopsis: “The Informant” is a true story that parallels a mixture of “A Beautiful Mind” and “The Insider” — where real life Ph.D.s had done something extraordinary. Based on Kurt Eichenwald’s 2000 book, “The Informant” is the tale of Mark Whitacre (played by Matt Damon), an Ivy League Ph.D. who was a rising star at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in the early 1990s. The bipolar hero wound up blowing the whistle on the company’s price fixing tactics and became the highest-ranked executive to ever turn whistleblower in US history. Whitacre secretly gathered hundreds of hours of video and audio tapes over several years to present to the FBI which became one of the largest price fixing cases in history. In the story — a dark comedy / thriller in director Steven Soderbergh’s hands — Whitacre’s good deed dovetails with his own major infractions and struggle with severe bipolar disorder.