No lie: Informant! is witty and weird

Steven Soderbergh delivers a cool, slyly funny psychological caper flick with The Informant!, in which the true-life tale of a corporate whistleblower is extruded through Soderbergh's dry sense of satire and nostalgia for 1970s cinema style into a nifty, if a bit bloodless, bagatelle.

A virtually unrecognisable Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, who in the 1990s exposed price fixing at Archer Daniels Midland, where he worked as a high-level executive. Kurt Eichenwald wrote about Whitacre in his 2000 book, The Informant, a fast-paced corporate thriller. But Soderbergh throws out the Civil Action playbook and instead focuses on the story's bizarre twists, most of which had to do with Whitacre's compulsive lying. Doing his best Philip Seymour Hoffman impersonation, the porn-moustached and well-padded Damon keeps up a chirpy interior monologue throughout The Informant!, digressing into woolly meditations that ping manically from corn to Japanese sex fetishes.

From the Saul Bass-era title sequence to Marvin Hamlisch's lush, brassy score, The Informant! plays like a loving homage to an era gone by, with Soderbergh using digital photography to give the movie a blanched, blown-out look. It all clicks along with satisfying wit and weirdness, and through it all Soderbergh retains his characteristic reserve and distance from the action at hand. He lays out the classic American tale of naivete, greed and moral ambiguity and trusts the audience to connect the dots.