Noir in the '90s

...In the final scene the two walk off happily into the L.A...

...Two current releases exemplify this trend...

...Another limitation of the film is its failure to effectively take us back into its period...

...Working in the style of his Natural Born Killers (1994), he alternates film stock and lens width with confusing rapidity, flashes his camera on and off his actors' faces and body parts, and cuts jarringly away to symbols that give little important information about the action...

...White, who also saw many comrades die, and who himself was seriously wounded in the final melee, bears Exley no malice for selling out...

...Bud White (Russell Crowe) is shorttempered and violent, with a particular propensity for rescuing women in distress...

...It tells a complicated story with extraordinary economy, unraveling a string of plot threads that are tied up beautifully in the end...

...A mistake, too, is employing the very contemporary device of explaining the characters' personae in a few lines that don't do justice to their complexities...

...She is well-cast here, but peripheral to the movie's converging plots...

...Just after leaving his Mustang with a menacing and untrustworthy mechanic (Billy Bob Thornton), he spots the gorgeous Grace McKenna (Jennifer Lopez) carrying some heavy packages...

...The joke is that Bobby is a fool and a coward...

...Set in the 1950s, its story and situations bring to mind such noir masterpieces as Fritz Lang's The Big Heat ( 1953) and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958...

...No one, the filmmaker included, appears disturbed by their sellout...

...Though it takes place in the present day, its plot sounds like a blueprint for a novel by James M. Cain or Jim Thompson, who wrote many of the stories noir films were based on...

...Three suspects are identified and arrested so early in the film that anyone familiar with the species knows they cannot be the real killers...

...Noir protagonists were loners trapped in a corrupt world: determined cops trying to solve a particularly difficult case, weary criminals planning what they hoped would be their last heist, lost souls with a tarnished past wandering into a town full of dark secrets...

...Just when it seems she will take center stage and unmask herself as a conniving femme fatale, she is transformed into another stock figure, the prostitute with the heart of gold, and vanishes from the action until the denouement...

...A suspicious sheriff (Powers Boothe) tracks his steps...

...sunshine...

...Made in the age of McCarthyism's rise and fall, escalating nuclear proliferation and an intensifying Cold War, these movies adapted contemporary pulp detective fiction to reflect the intense paranoia of their times...

...here the happy ending suits the ethos of the Clinton era...

...When a powerful detective turns out to be a criminai mastermind, the revelation hardly comes as a surprise...

...Confidentialreworks the 1950s detective story, Oliver Stone's U-Turn looks much more satirically at another side of film noir...

...The Coen brothers' disturbing Miller's Crossing ( 1990) was a complex tale of gangland revenge that dealt with racial prejudice and homoeroticism...

...Films that are this much fun to piece together as they progress are quite a rarity...

...Although swank hats, shiny marquees and sleek cars fill the screen, they have that clean, polished, movie look that reminds you they are simply props...

...They have no fondness for one another, but all of them get caught up in solving a bizarre multiple slaying at a local caf...

...And since most of the other important characters are cops, it is not hard to determine the identity of the true culprits...

...Stone approaches the material with a sledgehammer...

...a feisty bully (Joaquin Phoenix) tries to fight him for her...

...After dozens of killings and a bloody shootout that echoes the climax of The Big Sleep (1946), Exley uncovers a trail of police corruption that leads to the District Attorney's office...

...a high-strung ticket seller (Laurie Metcalfe) almost has a nervous breakdown when he begs her to spot him the money for a bus out of Superior...

...In this respect, Hanson follows them admirably...

...The acting ranges from serviceable to excellent...

...He can't bring himself to kill either of them, so he wanders aimlessly around the town, bumping into a series of characters who seem to have failed auditions forthe latest DavidLynch movie...

...After two hours of unrelenting visual assault, we are too exhausted to care...

...it seems a matter of course that a character should agree to further a government cover-up if doing so will secure him personal gain...

...Given its psychobabble and defeated expectations, L.A...

...Kim Basinger has made her career playing mystery women...

...Brian DePalma's Blow Out (1981) concerned a government agent who covered up a political assassination by masquerading as a sex killer...

...Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), set in the 1930s, linked a story of domestic abuse with a vicious tycoon's scheme to control water rights in Southern California...

...Here things become obvious...

...As the film advances, he seems decreasingly interested in status grubbing...

...Although the script is funny and the cast terrifically game, he pounds out so many disorienting and muddy images that he again proves himself the most kinetic and the dullest director working today...

...James Cromwell, worlds away from the benign farmer of Babe, is hardboiled and determined as the cops' boss...

...He offers to help her and she invites him home, where she tries to seduce him into killing her husband Jake (Nick Nolte) and running off with his fortune...

...Matching content to form, they added new dimensions to the paranoid atmosphere that is central to the noir tradition...

...Yet in the end Exley promises to keep silent in exchange for another promotion...

...He concentrates solely on the shots and cuts that will forward his narrative as prudently as possible...

...Great noir directors like John Huston, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Howard Hawks could convey visual shadings that escape Hanson, but they were chiefly interested in keeping their tales moving...

...Confidential has no right to succeed as well as it does...

...Though the genre's heyday is long past, some filmmakers have continued to work successfully in the noir tradition, creating atmospheric mystery stories that mirror contemporary terrors as well as adult themes vintage Hollywood films were barred from expressing...

...Stone is the antithesis of Hanson, who never let his ego disrupt the narrative flow of L.A...

...a homeless Indian feigning blindness cajoles him with Zen-like pronouncements that sound like outtakes from Little Big Man...

...Hudgens is a Red-baiter who spits out a few quaint epithets, yet for the most part the language used sounds very much like that of the '90s...

...In cahoots with Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito), editor of the gossip magazine Hush Hush, Vincennes rums drug busts and prostitution arrests into photo opportunities that keep him in the public spotlight...

...Bobby Cooper (Sean Perm) is a smalltime hood forced to stop in the tiny town of Superior, Arizona, for car repairs...

...Later, Jake corners Bobby and promises that if he will kill Grace and make it look like an accident, he will get a share of the insurance money...

...At a time when it is de rigueur for a filmmaker to announce his presence with directorial flourishes, Curtis Hanson is a refreshingly anonymous helmsman...

...The political notes the film sounds are sour, but arguably appropriate to our decade...

...While L.A...

...It is impossible to mistake U-Turn for the work of any other filmmaker, but Stone's obsession with showing off his artistry robs the movie of its momentum...

...Based on a novel by James Ellroy, L.A...

...But while neonoirs continue to crop up, and to find imaginative ways to keep the genre relevant, they increasingly manifest the oversimplifications and condescending attitudes that characterize too many '90s films...

...he appears to have become involved in solving the café murders because he genuinely wishes to capture the true felons...

...He needs cash badly, but constantly vacillates between the threats and bribes of the husband and the sexy overtures of the wife...

...the same director's Frantic (1988) looked at international terrorism through the eyes of a man whose wife had been mysteriously kidnapped...

...I wonder what a talented director like John Dahl—who made the histrionic and darkly entertaining Red Rock West (1993) and The Last Seduction (1994)—or a great one like Robert Airman—who parodied the Philip Marlowe character in The Long Goodbye (1973) and the allstar thriller in The Player (1992) —might have done with the same cast and script...

...Appropriately, these heroes are both reprehensible and fascinating...

...Confidential is a long, intricately plotted, frequently exhilarating movie about corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department...

...Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) has a keen intelligence and ethical sensitivity, but uses them merely to get ahead on the force...

...As recently as 1990, in Q&A, such complicity was treated as high tragedy...

...Precisely because they dealt in suspicion, depravity and doubt, noir films were deeply moralistic...

...Those recent examples were done in color, but their tones were deep and rich enough to mimic the black-and-white style of their classic predecessors...

...At the climax, as the bodies pile up, Grace suddenly lets out that Jake is her father...

...Its prologue follows the adventures of three very different policemen on a fateful Christmas Eve...

...a lovestarved teen (Clare Danes) flirts with him...

...Despite its flaws, however, it is an astonishingly entertaining movie...

...Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), a celebrity detective, serves as consultant to Badge of Honor, a Dragnet-like television show...

...Confidential...

...All this, including a wildly violent climax in the desert that parodies the close of Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1925), could have been a good black comedy if it were executed with a light touch...

...Coined by French critics to describe distinctly American works, it refers generally to the stark, moody "B" thrillers of the late 1940s and '50s whose classics were shot in shadowy black-and-white in close rooms, long corridors and desolate streets...

...Kevin Spacey, twitchy and mannered in his last several roles, gives a marvelously understated performance, overplaying his hand only in a few instances...

...they brooded about the legal and ethical codes their characters were forced to bend and break...