Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

GarnettTeenage The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Scotty Burke It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

NateWatchesCoolMovies Lee Tamahori's Mulholland Falls gets a bad rap in some circles for being boring and uneventful despite its charismatic cast and opulent setting that's ripe for peppy action sequences. I think they are confusing boring with the concept of a paced and very slow burn, yet one with all the texture and richness of an action film, one that admirably decides to take the route of the old school noir, with loving care put into story and character, two elements which the action and violence live simply to serve, and not to take the driver's seat against. Or it's simply not some people's cup of tea, which is totally okay too. Personally though, I love a good L.A. cop yarn that has a story to go with the toughness. This one bears striking similarity to 2013's Gangster Squad, which also had Nick Nolte playing a 1940's Los Angeles cop in charge of a squad that operates outside of the law. That film is pure cheese, all razzle dazzle and no plot. Mulholland Falls falls somewhere between Gangster Squad and L.A. Confidential; not quite up to delving into the serpentine intrigue of the latter, yet infinitely more interested in telling a worthwhile story than the former. And tell it does, in high flying style that only a crime film set in that time period can do. Nick Nolte plays Hoover, a whiskey voiced, take no prisoners LAPD badass who heads up an elite anti corruption task force that operates far outside the red tape and pretty much do what they want to stomp out corruption. His squad consists of Michael Madsen, Chris Penn and a scene stealing Chazz Palminteri as the oddball of the bunch, with serious impulse control issues. A straight up dream cast of tough guys, and although I'll admit that Penn and Madsen are a tad underused, their presence alone boosts the film's credentials into an epic pantheon. The film revs up with a kicker of an opening sequence in which the squad severely roughs up a troublesome mobster (an uncredited William L. Petersen). "This isn't America, it's Los Angeles" Nolte growls to him, stating the tone of perverse lawlessness which permeated the city back then. Soon he's drawn into a tawdry scandal involving the murder of a young prostitute (Jennifer Connelly) who he previously had encounters with. The search leads him far and wide, crossing paths a sleazy photographer (Andrew Mcarthy), a dying air force tycoon (John Malkovich manages to ham it up even at his most laid back) and his stern lieutenant (Treat Williams). Nolte also has a poor jilted wife played nicely by Melanie Griffith in limited but effective screen time. The plot is hard boiled to the bone, with Nolte in one his most gruff mid career roles and loving every stressed out, rage fuelled second of it. The conclusion is his show, with a whacked out Palminteri in tow for a spectacular sequence set aboard a doomed military aircraft. The cast gets deeper, believe it or not, with Daniel Baldwin, Ed Lauter, Kyle Chandler, Titus Welliver, Louise Fletcher, Rob Lowe and Bruce Dern contributing gamely. This one's got style on it's side and then some, replicating a sense of time and place with the torque ramped up to near Sin City levels. Admittedly not perfect, but a pure and simple blast of a flick, in my opinion.

chaos-rampant I saw this together with Devil in a Blue Dress for a night of surveying how noir - the first modern genre - has evolved as our modern world has. And what a world of difference they make.Both are set in the 40s and minutely try to recreate the era. Both are about women who have disappeared (here she turns up dead), a set of incriminating images and conspiracy that goes all the way up. Both derive from The Big Sleep, this one via Chinatown.But Devil felt alive, it had a measure of real desperation, urgency in the noir, a sense of place that lingered and enveloped. There was a very cogent reason for it to be set in a time of rampant discrimination against black people.This, it's not even noir, merely set in a time of noir movies. They put the same hats that people in film noir movies used to wear, the Buicks they drove, the same shiny recreation of an era as LA Confidential, but it's dead, has no pulse, and to treat noir like a period piece when it was a modern thing in its time (those were just the hats people wore) is to suck all its life away and leave us with a mannequin doll propped up on a stage.You'll know it by looking at the plot of passionate lovemaking that the head cop recalls, which is the defining moment in noir, the narrator succumbing to desire that sucks him into a devious story, captured as in Big Sleep by a hidden camera. Had he not had fallen for her, she would have been just another body when found, he would never have entered the story. But it's like a cardboard box painted like an engine, it just looks the part.No, it's simply a style that is being regurgitated here with no understanding by actors wearing noir clothes. Badly written and a TV-level of imagination to boot, as close to the noir world as a James Bond spoof is to the world of spying.Noir Meter: 1/4

david-sarkies The name of this movie comes from a place in the movie where the good guys throw the bad guys off of a cliff to let them know that they are not welcome in Los Angeles. This movie is set at about the same time as LA Confidential (in fact probably a little after World War II, considering the plot) and at this time the police rule the city and the criminals are being driven out by simple brute force.This movie is more of a murder mystery than anything else. A dead girl is found in an indent in a quarry and it seems that she has fallen from a great height. The thing that makes this death important is that the girl is a cop's mistress (Hoover - played by Nick Nolte) and he wants to find out why she died. As he searches he comes to find out that the girl's neighbour taped her with her men and has taped something that somebody doesn't like, as he lands up very dead.There isn't anything too deep in this movie. It seems to be that Hoover is trying to come to terms with the death of his mistress, and even though he had dropped her a while back, he still seems to feel responsible for it, so he is determined to get to the bottom of it. The bottom involves the military and some testing of atomic bombs, but it is something that J. Edgar Hoover is supporting. What is going on doesn't seem to be that much of a conspiracy (though if the effects of radiation got out then bad things would happen - but we already know about it now).This movie seems to be more of a character study of Hoover than anything else. This is a guy who loves his wife dearly, but also fell in love with another woman, had an affair with her, and then broke it off when he realised that it was not the right thing to do. Even then he still has strong feelings for her and is torn between his love for her and his loyalty to his wife. He does love his wife, and his wife is what matters, so when the bad guys give the film to his wife as a threat, it is simply a threat that has been carried through meaning that they no longer have any hold over him. The ending also reveals this aspect of the movie as it is not him catching the bad guys (which he does) but rather it is him trying to reconcile with his wife, and the movie leaves us hanging - she walks off. It is not a typical Hollywood ending where he is forgiven and they get back together - she simply walks off leaving him to deal with his betrayal of her.Now I come to think of it, it is the deep characterisation and the struggle that Hoover feels within himself that makes this movie stand out from the rest of Hollywood garbage. It is one that does not have a conclusive ending and also attacks the idealistic feel of the fifties.

paul weissman When I watched this film recently I thought that it must have been made by people trying to capitalize on the success of L.A. Confidential. It has the same look and it has nothing short of a phenomenal cast list. But it actually came out a year before L.A. Confidential. I suspect that the L.A. Confidential producers wee quaking in their boots after this attempted film noir bombed at the box office. But of course, L.A. Confidential turned out to be a great success and is remembered as one of the truly great modern film noirs, combining all of the best features of a great film, and getting that 40's and 50's feeling just right.About all the Mulholland Falls gets right is the 40's and 50's feeling. But the cast of the Hat Squad come off as almost comic book figures. They drive around town in a big convertible but their hats never even flicker, less blow off in the breeze, even when they are trying to outrace an Army jeep at a nuclear test site. Indoors, they take off their coats but never their hats.The pace of the movie is glacially slow. It's difficult to stay awake. The writing is sub-par and all too predictable. The two talented and beautiful women in the movie, Melanie Griffith and Jennifer Connelly are largely wasted with relatively little screen time. In one comical scene Connelly is slapped by her mobster boyfriend and barely flinches. She returns the slap and almost knocks the guy over. Aren't mobsters supposed to be able to hit better than that? Or at least take a slap from a girl? Parts of the plot are beyond ridiculous. At the nuclear test site, the Hat Squad takes off down a road marked restricted, shoots the padlock off a locked gate, and then acts surprised when the Army comes after them. And John Malkovich as an effete and intellectual Army general in a red smoking jacket is so out of place to be absurd.Continuity is also a shambles in this film. During the airplane fight, Treat Williams has one of the rip cords from a parachute tied around his neck as he is thrown to the floor of the plane in front of the door. The next shot is a close-up of him sitting on the floor and the cord is mysteriously gone. At the end of the film, the three surviving members of the Hat Squad place their hats on the coffin of their fallen comrade. Nick Nolte then proceeds to put on his hat (not the one on the coffin) as they walk away. Where did that hat come from? The film has its moments but its poor writing and incredibly slow pace waste a great cast that tries as best they can to overcome the deficiencies of a crummy plot.