Continuing with “the list” here are numbers 80-61.
And don’t forget to check out Andrew Brenner’s list. He’s getting prolific with this stuff.
No more ado. Here we go.
NUMBER 80 – L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997)
Here’s another film like The Royal Tenenbaums that is just perfectly put together. The casting is almost a dream, and the performances are fantastic (Kim Basinger in an Academy Award winning role, plus Russell Crowe, Guy Peace AND Kevin Spacey all shine.) Director Curtis Hanson must be independently wealthy—he’s only made 4 films in the decade since L.A. Confidential. Either that or he put all he had creatively into this one. Either way, this film is alive. The sets and set decoration capture a vibe of 1950’s L.A. leaping right out of stock footage and the pages of pulp magazines and tabloids (it should come as no surprise that Hanson based a ton of what he did visually on old videos, photographs, and postcards.) But seeing those scenes come to life with actual, three-dimensional characters, and one heck of a well-imagined thrilling story, is just icing on the visual cake. To me this film is a masterpiece because the story works so well you don’t even notice everything else that went into the film technically, and yet you can really appreciate it merely for the technical aspects as well if you choose to (the DVD notably has a “music only” audio track, the only such track I’ve seen on a DVD.)