(Photo illustration Los Angeles Times; photos A24, Miramax Films, Paramount Pictures, UCLA Film & Television Archive, Warner Bros. Pictures; illustration Luke McGarry / For The Times)
The 33 best L.A. crime movies, ranked
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Why do Los Angeles and crime go so well together on screen? A paradise this sunny must be hiding something dark and not quite on the up and up. The earliest noir writers like Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain noticed this; so many of the classic pulp novels are L.A. stories. Hollywood added another layer of pretending: a place where killer instincts are honed. Add to it Los Angeles’ real-life history of municipal corruption and you begin to wonder why every crime film isn’t set here.
Our list of the 101 best Los Angeles movies is as sprawling as the city, and includes “Chinatown,” “Clueless,” “Blade Runner,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Heat,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The Big Lebowski” and “La La Land.”
When we dove into the project of ranking the 101 best Los Angeles movies, it was — in a thorough sense — a tour of a criminal underworld, the flip side of Disneyland. Our most genius modern directors have taken their own midnight drives through the crime movie: wisecracking gangsters, femme fatales in shades and the laconic detective, half beach bum, half Philip Marlowe. They may not all be ready for their close-ups but that late-afternoon haze will do the rest. — Joshua Rothkopf, film editor
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1. ‘Chinatown’ (1974)
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( Paramount Pictures)
Layer exposes layer, mystery unveils mystery. Which is why “Chinatown” is the most emblematic Los Angeles movie of them all, in that it never stops revealing itself, eventually becoming resoundingly familiar and consistently fresh. (Even the fact that its director would become a convicted sex offender on the run from the law becomes another complication in the film’s knotty legacy.) The gold standard of conspiracy thrillers examines the city’s expansion through the 1930s via a foundational myth of how water came to flow to L.A. and who profited from bringing it here. Though there are locations from the movie that still exist — you can toodle around the lake at Echo Park or pop into the Prince bar — it’s the cynical spirit of the thing that hangs like a haze, an essential unknowability implied by its notorious final line: “Forget it Jake — it’s Chinatown.” As for the why behind it all, let’s leave that to John Huston’s rapacious Noah Cross. What exactly does he want? “The future, Mr. Gittes, the future.” That’s still something we hear every day.
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2. ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950)
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(Paramount Pictures)
A screenwriter floats face down in the pool of a crumbling estate located on L.A.’s most famous street, narrating his own demise. Has any opening scene captured the glamorous brutality of Hollywood better than Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard”? It’s the story of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), who once made it big (“it’s the pictures that got small”) and refuses to accept that Tinseltown has moved on from her, and flailing hack Joe Gillis (William Holden), who finds himself Norma’s live-in himbo while evading the repo men. A host of luminaries play versions of themselves in this ironic meta-noir that remains as cutting today as it would in any era of Hollywood history. Joe thinks he’s just missed the golden age; Norma can’t stop reliving hers. Either way, no one’s happy in the present. Somehow, heartbreak feels awful in a town like this.
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3. ‘Double Indemnity’ (1944)
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(UCLA Film & Television Archive)
From the Los Feliz Spanish-style mansion where Barbara Stanwyck’s scheming Phyllis Dietrichson flashes a “honey of an anklet” and the bowling alley at Third and Western where smooth-talking insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) tries to shake off her spell to the night-shrouded hills overlooking the Hollywood Bowl where he realizes his mistake, Los Angeles is more star than setting. Directed by Billy Wilder and co-written by Raymond Chandler, this 1944 adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel sets the standard for L.A. noir with film’s most famous insurance scheme made sexy by Stanwyck’s ice-blooded siren and MacMurray’s antihero, a man so cool he lights matches with the flick of a thumbnail. It’s a story of multifaceted betrayal, but even some of the best lines — “There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff, 45 miles an hour” and “How could I have known that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”— make it clear that these particular twists and turns could only happen in L.A.
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4. ‘The Long Goodbye’ (1973)
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(United Artists)
Robert Altman invented the modern L.A. film: discursive, cynical, unfooled by take-the-top-down glamour. (We also have him to thank for his gifted disciple, Paul Thomas Anderson.) Among Altman’s many locally shot triumphs — including a couple of career comebacks — can this be the one? Easily. It’s the city subsumed in paranoid exhaustion, a place where nude hippies, exploitative doctors and one picky house cat can stymie a decent if shaggy gumshoe (Elliott Gould, hatching a whole new way to play Philip Marlowe). “You’re a real ding-a-ling,” says Sterling Hayden’s blocked novelist; his Malibu Colony beachhouse was Altman’s own. But sometimes it takes a wobbling bumblebee to find the honey.
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5. ‘Heat’ (1995)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
It is no exaggeration to say that every location used for Michael Mann’s masterful crime story and study of male psychology is striking and memorable. From its opening robbery on Venice Boulevard to an epic downtown shootout to the climactic foot chase on the runways at LAX, as well as memorializing since-closed places like the restaurant Kate Mantilini where Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have their definitive coffee break together, the film is a sweeping portrait of the city’s diverse topography. The moment when Pacino jumps in a helicopter to careen across the nighttime skyline might best encapsulate all that is thrilling, magnificent and daring about the movie, one that makes L.A. come alive.
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6. ‘L.A. Confidential’ (1997)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
It’s not that novel to note that Los Angeles has a sunshine surface and rot beneath. Instead, director Curtis Hanson illustrates how the two intertwine in an ecosystem of movie stars, drugs, gangsters and tabloid reporters like Danny DeVito’s Sid Hudgens who get their thrills spilling the dirt. “You’d think this place was the Garden of Eden,” Sid wisecracks in his opening monologue over footage of Mickey Cohen dancing at the Mocambo in West Hollywood. Almost every character in the movie looks posh but sells their souls for cheap, from Kim Basinger’s celebrity clone sex worker to Kevin Spacey’s fame-addicted cop.
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7. ‘The Player’ (1992)
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(Fine Line Features)
Before “The Studio” put a bumbling face to movie execdom, Robert Altman’s scathing satire about an amoral studio suit (adapted by Michael Tolkin from his own novel) used the terrain of schmoozers and sharks to give Hollywood the biopic it deserved. Wheeling and dealing out of Hollywood Center Studios (now Sunset Las Palmas), Tim Robbins’ Griffin Mill also haunts celeb-studded Geoffrey’s Malibu, the Sunset Tower Hotel and Hollywood Forever Cemetery. But it’s in darkness and obscurity — and the ’burbs — where he commits his fateful crime: killing a screenwriter and his dreams in the parking lot behind South Pasadena’s Rialto Theatre (now a church).
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8. ‘Nightcrawler’ (2014)
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(Open Road Films)
“L.A. is vibrating at night in a way you’d never really know,” observes Jake Gyllenhaal’s amoral opportunist who finds his calling when he happens upon a cameraman shooting an accident scene. Hey, it beats stealing copper wire. Gyllenhaal’s saucer-eyed sociopath spends the rest of the movie driving around Koreatown, Hollywood and the Valley, looking for trouble, becoming a professional voyeur and working his way up the local media food chain, desperate for blood. Dan Gilroy’s 2014 neo-noir captures L.A. after dark in a way that feels thrillingly alive. After watching it though, you might decide to stay in tonight.
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9. ‘Pulp Fiction’ (1994)
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(Miramax Films)
Though Jack Rabbit Slim’s doesn’t exist, the 1950s themed diner where Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) do their now-iconic dance feels like a place that could find a home here. A Marilyn Monroe impersonator in her emblematic white dress holds a trophy while patrons sit in booths fashioned to resemble classic cars. It’s California-loving kitsch with a heavy dose of Hollywood fantasy. Outside of this place, in neighborhoods ranging from Atwater Village to Canoga Park, Quentin Tarantino unfurls gritty violence, tough talk and shootouts galore, but within the enticing artificiality of this fake establishment, movie magic exists, for us and for the characters. And isn’t that tug of war between fake and real what L.A. is all about?
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10. ‘Collateral’ (2004)
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(DreamWorks Pictures)
Director Michael Mann turned Stuart Beattie’s taxicab-killer thriller script into a love letter to his adopted city, shooting the film almost entirely at night on early digital video (which has aged beautifully). Tom Cruise, an obsessive perfectionist like Mann, breaks bad here as silver-haired assassin Vincent; Jamie Foxx is his unlucky cabbie Max, also playing against type. As they drive from a jazz joint in Leimert Park to a Mexican cowboy bar in Pico Rivera and a K-town nightclub, Mann nails not just the layout and traffic patterns of this sprawling city, but its diverse communities — including the coyotes.
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11. ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ (1988)
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(Touchstone Pictures)
You know you’re an Angeleno when you start describing Robert Zemeckis’ cartoon noir as the story of how our city got cheated out of cheap public transportation. Likewise, you get riveted by the character-use contract negotiations between Warner Bros. and Disney that mandated Daffy Duck and Donald Duck share exactly the same amount of screen time — hence their piano duel — and that it must be Bugs Bunny, not Mickey Mouse, who pranks Bob Hoskins’ detective Eddie Valiant by handing him an inopportune spare tire. Technically, the entrance to Toontown is in Griffith Park. But we’re all living in it.
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12. ‘Jackie Brown’ (1997)
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(Miramax Films)
Quentin Tarantino made his most grounded film with “Jackie Brown,” setting it in the South Bay sprawl he knew growing up in Torrance. The story unfolds in places like the Cockatoo Inn, Del Amo Fashion Center and a bail bonds office in Carson. Pam Grier stars as a flight attendant moving cash for a gun runner, quietly working both sides and waiting for the moment when the leverage finally shifts. This isn’t the L.A. of premieres or power lunches, but airport lounges, strip malls and freeways, where time stretches and survival depends on nerve and timing. Tarantino dials down the flash and lets the pleasure come from rhythm, confidence and Grier’s cool control of every scene.
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13. ‘Mildred Pierce’ (1945)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
Opening with the sound of a gunshot from an isolated Santa Monica beach house, this 1945 adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel is a revolutionary consideration of classism in a city that often considers itself above such things. When her faithless husband leaves her, Mildred (Joan Crawford and a very hard-working lighting team) works her way from the “shame” of waitressing in Glendale to owning a chain of restaurants, all so she can give her spoiled rotten daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) the kind of Pasadena mansion life Mildred never had. A lesson in parenting, to be sure, but also a reminder that L.A. can be just as snobby as New York and that, while Glendale has always been hopping, there was a time when beach houses in Santa Monica were few and far between.
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14. ‘Speed’ (1994)
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(20th Century Fox)
A product of its time, “Speed” has a quintessentially ’90s-feeling premise, as absurd as it is absorbing. How else to describe an action-thriller that depends on an L.A. public city transit bus (the fictional “33 Downtown” bus route, yet looking like a Big Blue Bus from Santa Monica) that can’t slow below 50 miles per hour, lest it blow up along with everyone inside it? Cinematographer-turned-director Jan de Bont was wise enough to cast Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, the two capably bringing grit and charm to make this film double as both a paean to Los Angeles’ many interstate highways and a movie-long flirtation.
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15. ‘Training Day’ (2001)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
A tightly wound thriller built on intimidation and control, director Antoine Fuqua’s cop drama unfolds over a single day in Los Angeles, following a narcotics detective who knows exactly how the city works and how to exploit it. Denzel Washington’s Alonzo Harris uses his badge to shake down dealers, settle scores and test how far he can push a rookie partner (Ethan Hawke). The movie moves through South L.A. and Watts largely from inside cars and living rooms, places where authority is asserted quietly. Rather than offering a broad portrait of the city, Fuqua shows how power operates at the street level, dependent on familiarity and reputation. It’s a vision of L.A. where the rules change block by block.
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16. ‘Drive’ (2011)
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(FilmDistrict)
Pro tip: If you roll your car windows down with Kavinsky’s haunting “Nightcall” blasting through the speakers as you pass the Los Angeles skyline, you’ll suddenly notice you are wearing a jacket emblazoned with a scorpion. Merging the city’s ingrained driving obsession with its inextricable bond with the film industry, Nicolas Winding Refn conceives the perfect L.A. vigilante: a movie stunt driver whose side gig is criming in a getaway car. A stony Ryan Gosling embodies coolness as his character transforms the roads into a battlefield where his skills behind the wheel are a superpower. You won’t see him caught in traffic.
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17. ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
No writer has gotten under the skin of Los Angeles better than Raymond Chandler, whose Santa Ana winds made “meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks.” “The Big Sleep” is his most celebrated book partly because of this Howard Hawks version, which made a hash of the plot but created fireworks between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Detective Philip Marlowe knew his way around “a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in” and this investigation of how low crime and high society mixed helped create the L.A. noir template.
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18. ‘Die Hard’ (1988)
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(20th Century Fox)
In the film industry, everybody exaggerates their attributes, even those of our most famous buildings. Twentieth Century Fox advertised this action extravaganza as “40 stories of sheer adventure,” but in truth, the movie’s central location, Century City’s Fox Plaza (here dubbed Nakatomi Plaza), is only 34 floors. No matter: The building became iconic as the setting for Bruce Willis’ explosive big-screen breakthrough. His New York cop character doesn’t much care for L.A. and indeed, this Christmas classic celebrates just how delightfully bizarre the holidays are in a climate of no snow but plenty of salacious news media.
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19. ‘To Live and Die in L.A.’ (1985)
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(MGM/UA)
That title alone makes it essential for our list and Wang Chung’s theme song — approved by John Mulaney for his talk shows — has kept the movie current. But director William Friedkin’s crime film features several action scenes in and around Los Angeles, including memorable moments at LAX’s Tom Bradley International Terminal, Union Station, the L.A. River and several industrial warehouses. The centerpiece, though, is a chaotic wrong-way car chase along the Terminal Island Freeway near Long Beach. Friedkin knows a thing or two about car chases and he was actively trying to top himself here.
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20. ‘In a Lonely Place’ (1950)
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(UCLA Film & Television Archive)
Nicholas Ray loved his first Hollywood digs so much — a Spanish-tiled, fountain-centered bungalow at Harper and Fountain — it inspired the lush, alienating complex where Humphrey Bogart’s cynical, violent screenwriter meets Gloria Grahame’s aspiring starlet in this superb rewiring of Dorothy B. Hughes’ novel. A doomed love story (tinged with disgust at Hollywood conformity), it boasts another iconic Spanish revival locale in Beverly Hills’ City Hall. But for physicalizing Bogie’s spinning paranoia, it’s hard to beat a winding canyon road from moonlit Will Rogers State Beach. With this classic noir, L.A. officially became psychologically dangerous.
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21. ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ (1955)
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(United Artists)
So many of this noir’s real-world locations have been swept away by time or ulterior development motives: Those Bunker Hill apartments no longer stand and its Malibu beachhouse was taken out by a storm. But the movie itself remains an ominous indictment of secret power-playing. This is where Los Angeles truly becomes apocalyptic, influencing everything from “Pulp Fiction” and “Southland Tales” to the French New Wave. (Don’t get too hung up on the fact that we never see the “great whatsit.”) And if you haven’t had that dream in which you’re running barefoot down a dark and empty road, you just haven’t lived in L.A. long enough.
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22. ‘Point Break’ (1991)
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(20th Century Fox)
There’s no movie that will make you want to move to the beach more than Kathryn Bigelow’s surf-centric cops ’n’ robbers action bromance. She makes Malibu life intoxicating and sexy for a reason, showing us why upstart FBI agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) gets swept away by a gang of bank-robbing bros, led by their seductive spiritual leader Bodhi (Patrick Swayze). In scenes that span from Neptune’s Net to Westside house parties, Utah goes undercover, infiltrating the Ex-Presidents. Bigelow renders his journey so visually stunning and chemistry-laden that “Point Break” feels more like a love story.
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23. ‘The Fast and the Furious’ (2001)
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(Universal Pictures)
L.A. is a car town and Dominic Toretto is an L.A. guy, as established in this seminal cop-versus-street-racer face-off. Even when the franchise went global (and into actual outer space), the familia always made it home to clink Coronas at the Angelino Heights Craftsman where it all began. A spin-out at Dodger Stadium, tuna sandwiches at Toretto’s Market (Bob’s), a bro-down at Neptune’s Net and off to San Bernardino for Race Wars: Sacred gearhead texts don’t get much holier than the original “The Fast and the Furious,” which proved the power of a well-timed NOS boost while showcasing the multicultural spread of the city.
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24. ‘The Limey’ (1999)
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(Artisan Entertainment)
“What are we standing on?” asks Terence Stamp’s avenging Cockney dad, legitimately mystified. He’s at the infinity pool of Astral House in ritzy Nichols Canyon, offering him a floating view of the city that’s both immense and hazy. Steven Soderbergh’s thriller answers the question with Cubist editing: L.A. is past, present and future in a heady mix. Violence marks a stop in downtown’s warehouse district; Dinah’s on Sepulveda offers rumination to lonely souls. And at the historic coral-pink Hollywood Riviera apartments, “The Limey” becomes a pure palm-shrouded noir. The characters leave for a Big Sur climax, but Los Angeles is this movie’s hard-edged temptress of a star.
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25. ‘The Driver’ (1978)
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(20th Century Fox / Studio Canal)
Before Michael Mann brought crime cool to L.A., director Walter Hill seeded the field with this spare, efficient urban western, turning downtown’s latticework into a stoic getaway driver’s solitary turf. Ryan O’Neal has no name and few lines, but his speed and steering speak for him. Even wild-eyed Bruce Dern is just called the Cop and Los Angeles itself is anonymous. But there’s Torchy’s bar (a favorite location of the director), Union Station and, for vertical appreciation of the city at night, the Bonaventure’s glass elevators. Nothing beats the screech and fire of a suspicious O’Neal demolishing an orange Mercedes in a South Flower garage: subterranean parking as one wheelman’s rage room.
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26. ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ (1995)
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(TriStar Pictures)
When filmmaker Carl Franklin adapted Walter Mosley’s period novel, he strove to capture the look — and, more important, the feel — of Central Avenue circa 1948, interviewing older jazz musicians who told him stories from the time. The result is a moody, lived-in noir that chronicles the vibrancy of the city’s historic Black communities. Although Franklin shoots beloved sites such as the 6th Street Viaduct and Griffith Observatory majestically, he never takes his eye off the city’s moral rot. His movie’s hero, Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington), might crack the case, but he can’t solve the institutional racism surrounding him.
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27. ‘Point Blank’ (1967)
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(TCD / Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo)
This classic modern noir may begin on Alcatraz, but its heart and soul reside in our town. Using previously ignored locations like the Los Angeles River’s concrete flood channels and the massive support columns that hold up the city’s freeways, the film has a great eye for the beauty inherent in emptiness and sterility, presenting an L.A. that is removed and distant but undeniably striking. And Lee Marvin’s footsteps as he strides tirelessly down an empty LAX corridor are unforgettable.
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28. ‘Under the Silver Lake’ (2018)
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(A24)
David Robert Mitchell chased his sinuous, unrelenting “It Follows” with this deep-dish conspiracy comedy, as tangential as his prior film was linear. That could account for the mystified reaction it got. But there’s a similar lure here, a compulsion for puzzle-solving that makes like-minded viewers feel seen. Mitchell’s L.A. is the besotted one of a transplant: Bronson Caves in Griffith Park (better known from TV’s “Batman”); downtown’s The Last Bookstore; the inky blackness of the title reservoir. It’s the work of someone swinging for the fences, trying to make his own semi-stoned “The Big Lebowski.” That’s impossible not to love.
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29. ‘Inherent Vice’ (2014)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
The Los Angeles of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies isn’t just a place but a specific state of mind, each film encompassing a different way of experiencing the city. In this adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel, he takes viewers back to 1970, immersing us in the already curdling promise of the counterculture, embodied by Joaquin Phoenix’s burnout hippie-detective who’s going to seed alongside the film’s South Bay hangouts and Topanga Canyon mansions. “Inherent Vice” is Anderson’s most bittersweet, dreamlike portrait of L.A., eulogizing its utopian allure of endless summers, beautiful beaches and free love that never came to be.
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30. ‘The Bling Ring’ (2013)
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(A24)
“I wanna rob.” Hip cocked, midriff bared, cigarette pressed between her lips, Emma Watson’s indelible plea to “visit” Paris (as in Hilton) encapsulates the perfect inside-baseball deadpan of Sofia Coppola’s crime saga — not least because Hilton opened up her Mulholland Estates home for scenes of the Bling Ring burglarizing it. No film crystallizes the shallow, amoral bluff of Hollywood’s high-tabloid era with such icy precision, from the flat affect of the teenage protagonists to the late Harris Savides’ minimalist digital photography. Largely misunderstood upon its release, “The Bling Ring” now registers as an incisive comedy of manners for a society of influencers just then being born.
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31. ‘Against All Odds’ (1984)
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(Columbia Pictures)
Maybe your memory of this one has something to do with Phil Collins, a sultry Mexican tryst and a shirtless Jeff Bridges. But elsewhere, director Taylor Hackford mounts a scary and thrilling high-speed Porsche-Ferrari race along a winding stretch of Sunset Boulevard near Bel Air and UCLA, one that deserves comparison to the chase in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection.” Other locations include the Palace nightclub in Hollywood and the Ginger Man, a celebrity hangout owned by Carroll O’Connor (“All in the Family”).
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32. ‘The Crimson Kimono’ (1959)
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(UCLA Film & Television Archive)
A hard-boiled wake-me-up from intense, iconoclastic Sam Fuller, who believed film was a battleground and made movies that proved it. This particular battle was in L.A.’s rarely seen Japanese community as two rival LAPD detectives, one a Japanese American, investigate the murder of stripper Sugar Torch, gunned down on downtown’s Main Street. Fuller shot that scene guerilla-style, “live, no rehearsal, in real traffic,” the director reporting, “ironically, I really did not get much dramatic reaction … An almost naked, 6-foot-tall blond is running for her life down the street and nobody does a double take.” Only in L.A.
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33. ‘The Outside Man’ (1972)
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(UCLA Film & Television Archive)
From its opening aerial shots of downtown, few films capture the disorientation of newly arriving in Los Angeles quite like Jacques Deray’s thriller. Marrying a detached European sensibility with gritty genre storytelling, the film follows a French hit man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who comes to L.A. for a job and is double-crossed, trapped in a foreign place he is desperate to leave. With incredible locations — from sleazy clubs and an abandoned Venice pier to the upscale environs of Beverly Hills — there’s an existential blankness in its depiction of the city, a tone that a painter like De Chirico would have recognized.
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