L. A. Confidential (1997)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Jack Vincennes	Kevin Spacey	½
Bud White	Russell Crowe	½
Ed Exley	Guy Pearce
Dudley Smith	James Cromwell	½
Pierce Patchett	David Strathairn
Lynn Bracken	Kim Basinger	½
Sid Hudgens	Danny De Vito

Review

It was a classic noir Curtis Hanson directed and was universally hailed for with this film in 1997. And although the story doesn't have anything remarkable about it – it's a classic crime story by all accounts – the film arguably arrived at the right time and hit a nerve with both audiences and critics. The story, by Brian Helgeland from a novel by James Ellroy, captures the zeitgeist of 1950s Los Angeles, which had one foot in vigilante justice and corruption and the other in a more modern procedural legal system. The film's greatest asset is the beautiful rendition of a bygone time and the characters who epitomized it: the sly, but ultimately honest Jack Vincennes, the straightforward brute Bud White, the progressive and modern Edmund Exley, and – not least – Kim Basinger's Lynn Bracken, who in many ways is caught in the crossfire of it all. L.A. Confidential is a well-scripted, well-camouflaged whodunnit in which every piece ultimately falls perfectly into its historically correct place.