L. A. CONFIDENTIAL (87) (second viewing: 82)

Directed by: Curtis Hanson

Starring: Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, James Cromwell, Kim Basinger

The Pitch: In the 1940s, three very different LAPD officers stumble onto a massive cover-up involving a shipment of heroin and prostitutes "cut up to look like movie stars".

Theo Sez: It's always more fun to swim against the tide than to go with the flow - but really how can anyone go against the consensus for this velvet-smooth movie? Like Emma Woodhouse it's handsome, clever and rich ; unlike her it's hard-working and far from arrogant - everything has been worked out, beautifully so, and the intricacy makes you feel like a partner in some challenging high-level enterprise (not, as in most movies, like a moron to be exploited). Admittedly it has little emotional (let alone spiritual) resonance - it's storytelling, all the brilliant games you can play with convoluted plot and meaty characterisations ; like last year's best Hollywood movie, JERRY MAGUIRE (and of course quite unlike CHINATOWN, which everyone keeps bringing up for reasons known only to themselves), the ending is terribly soft, reinforcing the suspicion of a certain blandness beneath the stylish surface. Yet the pleasure of finding a big-studio movie where you don't have to keep making allowances - where you can just sit back and enjoy the twists and turns (love that "Rollo Tomasi" payoff!) without feeling alienated from the audience of slow-witted dullards the film is clearly being aimed at - is so intense it overshadows all ungenerous thoughts ; it's a reminder of how comfortingly luxurious a sleek, expensive production can feel, and how deeply satisfying it is when a story is told honestly and without shortcuts. It cries out for a second viewing, if only to check that it all hangs together ; yet I dread seeing it again, in case it doesn't - in case its memory is diminished. It really is that good. [Second viewing, 10 years later: fortunately, its memory hasn't been diminished all that much. Still immensely entertaining, but you notice details like Act 1 ending exactly at the one-hour mark (the Nite Owl apparently solved), which dims the pleasure slightly; for all its brilliance, it's still 'product'. Also hard to deny that it sides with violence as a necessary part of police work, but let's pretend that's just hard-boiled cynicism.]