L.A. Confidential

A Phoenix pick

James Ellroy's massive noir starts as a masterpiece of atmosphere, tough dialogue, and lurid detail that sinks, after several hundred pages, under implausible overplotting. The much-touted adaptation by Curtis Hanson retains most of the former while masterfully untangling, compressing, and realigning the latter.

It's 1950s Hollywood, and the LAPD is trying to polish its reputation as the world's greatest police force by sending up mob kingpin Mickey Cohen, but a string of assassinations culminating in the "Nite Owl Massacre" tarnishes its image. Brown-nosing pencil-neck geek Sergeant Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) gets a promotion after pinning the crime on a trio of "Negro" teens (like the book, the movie doesn't flinch before the period's shameless racism); subsequently he blows them away after a botched escape attempt. But something about the case doesn't sit right with Exley, and he forms an uneasy alliance with his nemesis, strong-arm cop Sergeant Bud White (Russell Crowe as a beefy Jack Webb), and slick Sergeant Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) to plumb the truth in a cesspool of corruption, pornography, prostitution, and murder.

Although the main characters' moral conversions are a bit glib, the dense narrative soars, and the performances -- especially Spacey's suavely cynical Vincennes -- convince. With Danny DeVito appropriately reptilian as a scandal-sheet editor, and Kim Basinger not looking at all like Veronica Lake as a call girl, Confidential is a glitzy tribute to the hardboiled genre. Screens at the Copley Place Thursday at 7:15 and 10 p.m. and Friday at 10 a.m. and 1 and 4 p.m.

-- Peter Keough

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