Terrific storytelling brought to life by a collection of inspired performances makes L.A. Confidential an absolute winner.

A thoroughly competent, but ultimately flavorless film. The acting is solid, the story is well-paced, and the major characters have defined arcs, but it's all executed in such a generic, perfunctory manner that the entire thing left me cold. The cheesy dialogue and generic archetype characters certainly set the film back, but at the end of the day it's a very solid film that never rises above being solid. It's pablum. The pablum is well-done and it's all technically sound, but it's also tremendously uninspired, checking the boxes for a prestige picture without adding anything new or interesting to the standard tropes it employs. Quite a disappointment for a film I was really looking forward to watching.

I have zero comprehension of the [spoiler]Lynn / Ed[/spoiler] relationship and the ending scene. The last third of the movie is much more poorly written than earlier sequences – it's like the writers felt an overbearing urgency to get to any kind of conclusion because of how little playtime they had left to do so.

LA Confidential starts off pretty slow, but gets better with the minute. The first half hour I kept mixing up names and places and didn't really get where the story was going. But after a while it picked up speed, the characters developed, the 'plot thickened' (as they say), and through all kinds of side-stories and personal quests it was slowly revealed where the story was headed to end with a bang. The story itself is pretty decent, but has been done (many times) before. The good stuff about this film is the film noir crime feeling, which really adds to the suspense. The best stuff about this film is the amazing acting by almost the entire cast; they managed to give so much personality to their individual characters that they really lifted this film from mediocre to great!

The happy ending didn't really make sense for a neo-noir film. [spoiler] Bud White surviving feels incredibly contrived and sours the finale. [/spoiler] What a shame.