L.A. Confidential: Hollywood’s Last Great Film Noir Anonymous 10th Grade

The term “film noir” usually evoke images of the 1940s and 1950s – a simpler, more black-and-white time in which one or two or three classic film noirs were released seemingly every year. After the 1950s, which is widely considered to be the golden age for noirs, good – and sometimes great – noir films were still produced by talented filmmakers. The genre had a minor resurgence in the 1970s with the release of films like Chinatown and The Long Goodbye, but didn’t return to prominence again until 1997, when Curtis Hanson’s neo-noir masterpiece L.A. Confidential was released. And it is Hanson’s film, which stars Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, and Russell Crowe, that marks the last great film noir to have ever been released. With a taught script that harkens back to the most famous noirs of the 40’s and 50’s, L.A. Confidential was successful not only because of its interesting story and themes, but because of Hanson and co-writer Brian Helgeland’s exceptionally unique script.

L.A. Confidential tells the story of three policemen (Guy Pearce’s Detective Exley, Russell Crowe’s Bud White, and Kevin Spacey’s Jack Vincennes) as they try to deal with corruption – and an unsolved murder that surrounds it – in early 1950s Los Angeles. And at...