Serpico

Nobody likes a tattletale. Rat, fink, snitch: the names say it all. Ask any whistleblower: it's a thankless role, even though the actors who play them get Oscar nominations. Frank Serpico, and Peter Maas's bestselling book from 1973, have both been overshadowed by Al Pacino's bearded portrayal, but his story, of a stubbornly unreasonable man bucking against a police culture of casual corruption (and possibly getting shot in the face for his troubles), remains, in Maas's skillful, efficient telling, a thrilling account of the sheer will required to fight the system, and the human inertia that tends to hollow out even the hardest-fought victories.