| Director: | Curtis Hanson |
| Writers: | Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson |
| Director of Photography: | Dante Spinotti |
| Editor: | Peter Honess |
| Music: | Jerry Goldsmith |
| Production Designer: | Jeannine Claudia Oppewall |
| Producer: | Curtis Hanson, Arnon Milchan and Michael G. Nathanson |
| Warner Bros.; R; 136 minutes |
| Release: | 9/97 |
| Cast: | Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito |
| Based on a novel by James Ellroy |
 L.A. Confidential Warner Bros. |
A gritty, gorgeous throwback to the golden age of noir. Hanson et al. triumph in paring down Ellroy's tangled, overwritten novel to a refreshingly un-cliched hardboiler. It's 1950s Hollywood and sleaze rules the city (what's new?). Three very different cops are all sniffing out the truth behind a series of murders at the Nite Owl coffee shop: Ed Exley (Pearce), the brown-nosing rookie who'll do anything to get ahead but sell out; Bud White (Crowe), a renegade unable to keep a lid on his raging temper; and Jack Vincennes (Spacey), a smoothie with a weakness for media exposure and a quick buck. Meanwhile, DeVito steals many a scene as a smarmy tabloid journalist, and Basinger purrs in slippery satin nightgowns as one of several hookers “cut” to look like starlets (she's supposedly Veronica Lake). Simultaneously tough-talking and lush-looking, the film immediately engrosses, with finger-snapping dialogue, superb acting, neon-soaked cinematography and quirky minor characters. While some cineastes argue that neo-noir just ain't the real deal,
L.A. Confidential proves that the genre has yet to go down for the big sleep.
