L.A. Confidential

I keep coming back to L.A. Confidential and every time I do, I lose a little more faith in the bland crime flicks churned out today. This is a movie that understands two things: people aren’t always what they seem, and Los Angeles is never as shiny as the billboards tell you. The film sets up shop in the early 1950s, a city crawling with beautiful people and ugly secrets. You get a trio of cops working a brutal murder that cracks open the rotten core of Hollywood’s glamour, and trust me, the closer they get to the center, the more you realize everyone’s hands are dirty.

Let’s talk about that cast. Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce—both still mostly under the radar when this came out—do the heavy lifting. Crowe’s Bud White is all brute-force and barely hidden pain, while Pearce’s Ed Exley is a stickler clinging to integrity in a world that’s allergic to it. Watching these two circle each other, sometimes brawling, sometimes reluctantly working together, is reason enough to watch. This movie also convinced me Kim Basinger could act, and I am not saying that lightly. She plays a Veronica Lake lookalike prostitute who manages to be soft, mysterious, and sad without ever feeling like a cliché.

Visually, this movie is just cool. Director Curtis Hanson gives everything this slick, moody sheen. The camera lingers on stuff the way a tabloid would: red lipstick, glistening rain-slick streets, dead-eyed blondes in mirrored boudoirs. Everything feels slightly too glamorous but also deeply tired, like LA is shimmering through a hangover. The production design actually pays attention to midcentury detail—not just cars and fedoras, but wallpaper, neon signage, those uncomfortable office chairs.

If I had to nitpick, the film does feel a little crowded. There are a ton of plot threads—corrupt cops, tabloid journalists, Hollywood scandals, all tangled together—and it feels almost a little too eager to show off all the underbelly it’s exposing. Sometimes the story takes a left turn and you blink, trying to remember how we ended up in this new alley. But most of the time, it somehow pulls the balancing act off.

The pacing is deliberate. It isn’t slow, exactly, but it does take its time setting up its pieces, so if you’re the kind of person who needs non-stop momentum, be warned. There are stretches where the characters are just vibing in seedy bars or quietly interrogating each other over whiskey, and I love those moments, because if the movie had just been fistfights and shootouts, it would have felt like another disposable detective story. Here, every bit of violence feels personal, and every bit of downtime makes you a little more nervous about what’s crawling up next.

What gives the movie real bite is the emotional weight—these aren’t cookie-cutter detectives gliding through. There’s a sense that every decision leaves a mark, and nobody makes it out clean. Watching Crowe’s White wrestle with his own brutality or Pearce’s Exley try not to compromise, the stakes actually feel human. Even Danny DeVito pops in as a greasy scandal writer, basically chewing up the film stock every time he opens his mouth.

The ending still feels a little too eager to tie things up, which I guess is my one big gripe. For a movie steeped in ugliness and ambiguity, the wrap-up borders on pat, at least for me. I get why they went for it, but I would’ve preferred five minutes more ambiguity and five minutes less bow-tying. It doesn’t wreck what comes before, but it does keep the film from reaching true noir greatness.

All told, L.A. Confidential nails so much. It doesn't just copy old noir movies, it updates them. There’s moral rot beneath the cigar smoke, and you feel it, right up until the last shot. If you want a movie that looks gorgeous, feels dangerous, and doesn’t stop to hold your hand, this is the one. Just don’t expect it to fix your low opinion of Los Angeles.