Michael Mann's Band of Outsiders.

• Author: SHARRETT, CHRISTOPHER

THE PAST HOLIDAY SEASON did not offer a great deal of outstanding movie fare. Even if the arena were crowded with works of distinction, a clear standout would be Michael Mann's "The Insider," and its achievement makes us reconsider his accomplishments in film and television of the past 20 years. Mann has, after all, made an important mark in media production, although his work is often treated with derision, as exemplars of the worst tendencies of the commercial entertainment industry. The story of Big Tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, the subject of "The Insider," is an extension of themes in the work of Mann, an underappreciated postmodern auteur. The common charge that he pumps up old formulas with grandiose style is repudiated by the extraordinary methods he uses to allow us to rethink genre conventions that the director reinvents.

Mann's work in television singlehandedly renovated the crime category with his stint on shows such as "Starsky and Hutch," although his real breakthroughs came as executive producer of the 1980s hit "Miami Vice." With its emphasis on flashy pastel colors, high-fashion clothes, rapid-tire editing, and rock music, "Miami Vice" was regarded as an emblem of the 1980s, its style borrowed from rock videos and advertising. It was, in a word, slick, and concerned with offering hyped-up eye candy that fit perfectly with the superficiality of the decade's commercial art. This journalistic wisdom, though, overlooked the lonely plight of Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs, the two Miami cops whose adventures, while generic, also conveyed the moody, fatalistic, defeated outlook that was perhaps the truest reflection of the Reagan era.

"Miami Vice" was something like brilliant sketchwork for Mann, whose vision was first realized in his initial feature film, "Thief" (1981). The movie, featuring an almost-forgotten superb performance by James Caan, is about a hardened ex-con planning a last big score before settling down to a normal life with his family. On the face of it, the story has cobwebs, dating to a host of gangster-as-tragic-hero movies, but Mann's style makes the picture visionary, his title character a brooding figure framed against the icy Chicago landscape.

Mann makes compelling use of his palette, emphasizing blues and ambers to suggest depression and isolation. He has a sensitive eye for the geometry of the city, and situates his lonely characters in urban and suburban backdrops in the manner of the paintings...