L.A. Confidential

Yeah, I got it after a second screening. A brilliant crime drama with a sophisticated script and the wonderful atmosphere of 1950s L.A., the film's main strength. The same can be said of the perfect cast lead by Crowe’s macho protector of women, he’s flawless. Guy Pearce outdoes himself here, this role opened him the door to the acting elite for a while, before it embarrassingly slammed in his face again a few years later. I am not giving this 5* just because the fairly similar Polanski's Chinatown is a notch better. (13/04/2003)

Gangster film as it should be - bloody, sometimes even brutal, with tough heroes, inconspicuous traitors, a beautiful femme fatale, and a brilliant shootout at the end. Exactly the type of movie where you give it the highest rating without hesitation at the end and the only thing you can say about it is that it is simply divine... (28/08/2006)

A stubborn gorilla with common sense, a crafty opportunist and a hypocritical, calculating careerist par excellence. All with a cop’s badge and doing things their own way. And all of them unknowingly working on the same case. A (non)noir multi-genre movie that in terms of plot and star-studded cast (and not just those in the main roles) was easily enough to make a trio of excellent movies, each of which could aspire to being a crime classic. Simply three in one in the form of a movie not to be missed, its only fault being that it didn’t finish one minute sooner - it could have avoided the undignified ending. And also a practical demonstration of “how to adapt a complex novel (Ellroy’s best - no less ingenious and ten times more complex) overflowing with characters, events and story for the big screen". (09/04/2011)

Directed in a clear, formally "retro-cool" style, the plot is multi-layered yet still engaging, and the acting is perfectly precise. It deftly makes 1950s America and the City of Angels into an alluring backdrop, within whose seemingly heavenly purity lies the dirtiness of a morality to which human life, let alone the law are sacred. Over the expansive 130-minute runtime, Hanson fleshes out the characters of the police officers, who surely deserved better personal histories than the boilerplate phrase about an abused child's sordid past or an exemplary son following in his father's footsteps. This is only broken by Kevin Spacey's cynical, self-righteous Jack Vincennes when, when asked why he joined the police, he replies "I don't really remember." Yet even that doesn't stop the film from captivating us with every frame, from breathing its amazing atmosphere onto audiences, but also making them wonder how the hell Kim Basinger could win an Oscar for such a role. PS: For me, the moment when Bud White breaks the chair is one of the most iconic moments of cinema. (08/12/2006)

Just as the sunny and idyllic suburban Los Angeles makes a beautiful mask for domestic violence, Mexican women strapped to the bed, dead bodies in the basement, and a pile of gunmen in the public toilets, a cop's musty, rotten, and lost soul is framed by the aura of good intentions that got him to join the force in the first place. Touching; today's movies work the exact opposite way. (19/06/2010)