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L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

Curtis Hanson United States, 1997
Signature
Style is really the saving grace of this crime thriller. In a swoon of cream and lemon Cadillac fins, fedoras, and rat-a-tat-tat dialogue and gunfire, Hanson snags our attraction long before he gives cause to like any of his characters... It doesn't just work; it soars. What's more, it never stops picking at our fancies – unstacking gorgeous layer from gorgeous layer, de-realizing Hollywood dreams, and laying a path to the Los Angeles cinema inhabiting our imaginations today.
May 17, 2017
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The film's undeniable pull can be attributed to both its traditionally gripping narrative and to how it maps out the ways in which its heroes adjust their moral codes... The filmmaking is competent and engaging but middlebrow, and Dante Spinotti's cinematography is striking but too clean to achieve Chinatown-level subversion.
October 24, 2008
Looking back, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL neatly fits into the long line of film-noirish masterpieces that came before it, from DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) to THE LONG GOODBYE (1973) to BLADE RUNNER (1982). It seems to confirm the idea that to make a great movie about L.A. you have to make people believe that it's full of skeletons in the closet. And it does the job well
September 26, 2008
Nick's Flick Picks
A wondrous troika of actors lends L.A. Confidential its slippery but distinctive erotic poignancy. Russell Crowe's brawny volatility, ascribed to his childhood outrage at witnessing spousal abuse, and Guy Pearce's punctilious primness, which he ultimately forfeits in order to prove his virility, basically amplify character profiles from 1940s noirs and police thrillers. Yet each actor imbues these basic traits with a highly contemporary life force.
January 1, 2003
As the story unfolds, carefully and elaborately, what develops is not just a remarkably intricate crime tale but a brilliant and compassionate story of people who struggle to rise above their flawed nature. This may be the best movie of the year; it's definitely one of the greatest crime films of all time.
March 29, 2002
Ellroy's plot pulls the movie out of its stylistic pose to give the actors a chance to make something of their characters... What is unexpected in this self-conscious pander to the cult of genre cinema is the violence. It lacks the dignity of constraint... The film embraces the cliches of a thousand crime thrillers, while making them look fresh.
January 19, 2001
Hanson's adaptation of Ellroy's most complex novel is a towering achievement, probably the finest mystery thriller since Chinatown... As the emotional nexus, a Veronica Lake lookalike trapped in a web of male desires, Basinger is arguably the pick of a perfect cast. Subtle, shocking, compelling and immensely assured.
October 30, 1997
Critics are already comparing "L.A. Confidential" to movies such as "Chinatown" and "Pulp Fiction." They're blowing smoke. This film hasn't the confidence or the nerve of either of those earlier pictures. You emerge from the theater feeling like Hanson finally managed to push "L.A. Confidential" past the usual boundaries -- your waiting hasn't been entirely in vain -- but by this point you're almost too burned out to care.
October 19, 1997
To help this film that has lived up to all its critical hype, I've been tempted to contribute to the hysteria by flat-out designating it as the "Citizen Kane of the film noir genre..." I decided against this sure-fire blurb, partly because I am less mesmerized by Citizen Kane than I once was and partly because the excellences of L.A. Confidential are not so much revolutionary as classical: narrative thrust, psychological depth, acting virtuosity, emotional expressiveness and stylistic sobriety.
September 29, 1997
The story isn’t entirely fresh... But Hanson’s way of telling the story catches you off-guard. He makes the familiar unfamiliar... At two-and-a-quarter hours, the picture is too long, and not exactly winged. But just when you start to get impatient with the plodding, one-thing-after-another style of narration, there’s a shocker that blows you into the movie’s last act... And L.A. Confidential, with its divergent plot strands, rockets to cop-movie heaven.
September 21, 1997
"L.A. Confidential'' is immersed in the atmosphere and lore of film noir, but it doesn't seem like a period picture--it believes its noir values and isn't just using them for decoration... [Hanson] weaves a labyrinthine plot, but the twists are always clear because the characters are so sharply drawn; we don't know who's guilty or innocent, but we know who should be... "L.A. Confidential'' is seductive and beautiful, cynical and twisted, and one of the best films of the year.
September 19, 1997
The New York Times
''L.A. Confidential'' is a tough, gorgeous, vastly entertaining throwback to the Hollywood that did things right. As such, it enthusiastically breaks most rules of studio filmmaking today... [and] it embroils [its characters] in a cliche-free, vigorously surprising tale that qualifies as true mystery rather than arbitrary thriller and that revels in its endless complications.
September 19, 1997