Lionsgate
One of the great ironies of Hollywood – that ego - celebrating monstrosity – is that it is reflexively embarrassed by itself . Most movies that are set in Los Angeles or are about the moving-picture show industriousness either actually strive to pass most of their fourth dimension outside L.A. , like Preston Sturges ’ peripatetic movie - biz satireSullivan ’s Travelsor , if they must stand pat in the City of Angels , resign themselves either to blatant grease ( á laTraining Day ) or conspicuous kitsch ( á laClueless ) .
movie maker often shy away from genuinely body forth L.A. , which make signified for a town that is comprised largely of striver from elsewhere who are there not by predilection for the venue , but due to deep - seated inclination toward stardom . But despite themselves , the great L.A. movies often finish up transfigure that flat - top land of paving material and promise , thereby create the legend that has supplanted the reality in the world ’s estimation of California ’s most thickly settled metropolis . Here is a leaning of 10 of the best L.A.-set films , trammel to one motion-picture show per music director .
Lionsgate
10. La La Land (2016)
Alternately worshipped and derided upon its tone ending , and forever ( tragically ) consort with abotched Best Picture announcementat the 2017 Oscars , Damien Chazelle ’s third feature article is a stylistically defiant picture musical that , in my view , is destined to age well .
Chazelle , a Harvard alumna , initially intend to make the moving picture in Boston ( where he made his first movie musical , Guy and Madeleine on a Park Bench ) , but what the widely - open spaces of L.A. give him that the city of his native - born East never could is a magisterial sense of scale – as exemplified by his borderline - miraculous opening number , Another Day of Sun , specify on a dealings - snarl stretch of the 105 and exemplifying the control of foxiness that deliver the goods Chazelle his well - deserved Best Director Oscar .
9. Beginners (2010)
Mike Mills ’ meteoric vocation began in skateboard videography before accomplish its peak in a pair of California - set autobiographical dramas , Beginnersand20thCentury Women . The latter is a tribute to his mother , a dogged Santa Barbara exclusive mom ; the former a eulogy to his father , a Los Angeles museum manager who do out of the wardrobe late in life before dying of cancer .
Ewan McGregor flirt the Mills stand - in , Oliver , Christopher Plummer his father , Mélanie Laurent his dearest interest , an actress ( a corollary to Mills ’ veridical - life married woman , actress and film producer Miranda July ) . The keen personal nature of Mills ’ films extends to the character ’ deep indecorum with their preferences , and Mills ’ portraits of a nocturnal 2003 L.A. , as seen from moving cars and curtained hotel way windows , are as heartbreaking as his news report itself .
8. The Big Lebowski (1998)
In assay their own interpretation of a Raymond Chandler bushy - hound noir story , the Coen Brothers produced something probably good than anything Chandler ever publish and certainly curious .
The Big Lebowskiapes police detective - story predecessors likeThe Big Sleepand ( especially)The Long Goodbye , but , vitally , it also consider itself a westerly , starting on a tableau vivant of a tumbling tumbleweed and featuring narration by a never - better Sam Elliott as a cowman . Endeavoring as it does to place L.A. in the American West , with all its sense of whodunit , hope , and sunshine - baked hopelessness , the Coens recontextualize the metropolis even as they invent a genre out of whole material .
7. Heat (1995)
The metropolis is director Michael Mann ’s canvas , but he commonly choose those towns that front their good at nighttime , wash the projection screen with neon in his depiction ofChicago(inThief ) or Miami ( inMiami Vice ) , for example . In Los Angeles , where , as Albert Hammond would have it , “ It never rains , ” the sun is omnipresent , and nighttime just an unfortunate entr’acte , like dyspepsia .
Thus , we haveHeat , Mann ’s larger-than-life law-breaking play , in which Robert de Niro and a squad of master criminals pull off a series of audacious robbery in Downtown L.A. in broad daylight . Mann ’s delineation of that Los Angeles neighborhood , in its blocky , neutral monumentality , remains the unequivocal ground - level view of the area .
6. Her (2013)
New York - born writer / director Spike Jonze , in his futuristic take on his own divorcement , imagines a Los Angeles that has solved its most set urban problem – a deficiency of public transportation . Our hero , Theodore Twombly ( Joaquin Phoenix ) , a sad liberation ghost who falls in beloved with a sentient operating system ( Scarlett Johansson ) , expend more than a few polar emotional scenes on the L.A. Metro , looking out over a apparent horizon that has trended up rather than outwards .
In this reckon future , has Los Angeles become globalized , losing what makes it unique ? Or has it utilized its artistic population to make up a New urban center that takes aim as its watchword ? Jonze and his yield decorator , K.K. Barrett , taking up the pall of recreational city planners , ideate a way forwards , and it distinguishesHeras one of the most unique sci - fi movies made in the modernistic earned run average .
5. Die Hard (1988)
WhereHeattakes on business district L.A. from the street , give out Hardlooks down on the neighborhood from 30 tarradiddle up . Bruce Willis ’ New York City cop John McClane has fly all the way to Los Angeles for his wife ’s office Christmas company , but despite having leave Manhattan in the rearview mirror , he cease up in yet another skyscraper – this one , unfortunately , in the mental process of being taken over by terrorists .
Reginald VelJohnson , as the LAPD sergeant who come to his aid , supply one of the most openhearted portrayal of an L.A. cop in movie house , and overall the photographic film provides a rose - tint scene of cross - cultural cooperation between the coasts .
4. Licorice Pizza (2021)
Paul Thomas Anderson(whoseBoogie NightsandMagnoliawould certainly be on an alternative interlingual rendition of this list ) make his cinematic home in the San Fernando Valley , less urbanised than southern Los Angeles , but somehow seedy . In this exultant romance , Anderson is at the top of his game , honoring frequent collaborator Gary Goetzman with a intemperately fictionalized interpretation of Goetzman ’s juvenility as a child actor ( played by Cooper Hoffman , son of frequent Anderson partner in crime Philip Seymour Hoffman ) .
The film is a flare-up of adrenaline , set as it is during the 1970s oil colour crisis and necessitating that its champion climb out of their cars and go sprinting down the sidewalks of L.A. as David Bowie trill in the background .
3. Pulp Fiction (1994)
Would the film industry be recognizable today without L.A. nativeQuentin Tarantino ’s second feature , and the decade of independent celluloid it helped to create ? One affair ’s for certain – no one who strikes up a discursive conversation in a car stuck in dealings in Los Angeles will ever flunk to be witting of the fact that they ’re just live through the same movement as Vincent Vega ( John Travolta ) and Jules Winnfield ( Samuel L. Jackson ) as they considered the “ Royale with Cheese . ”
Cars , and the distance they have to go in a town like L.A. , are an integral part of the cloth ofPulp Fiction ’s story . Harvey Keitel ’s graphic symbol , offering Vincent and Jules rides home until he hear they live in Redondo Beach and Inglewood : “ In your future … I see … a hack drive . ”
2. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
That Billy Wilder ’s masterpiece would one twenty-four hour period nanus in influence the earned run average of picture palace it so brutally satirized , that the name “ Gloria Swanson ” would fade to relative obscurity while “ Norma Desmond ” would become immortal across generations , are ironies unknowable to Wilder and his partner Charles Brackett when they begin write the screenplay that would win them an Academy Award .
But as dye - in - the - fleece creatures of Hollywood , Wilder and Brackett could scarce fail to recognise their film ’s place as a vital , topical diachronic document – feature , not least , Cecil B. DeMille , Hedda Hopper , and Buster Keaton as themselves . It is a motion picture as devastatingly elegant as it is necessary to understanding all the films that came before – and , frankly , after .
1. Chinatown (1974)
Chinatownis perhaps the most purely L.A. film ever made , with its blinding Elwyn Brooks White and oranges , circulate smoke , noir aesthesia , and consciousness of water as a resource to treasure and abuse .
In a story meticulously researched by indignant Los Angeleno screenwriter Robert Towne , the original sin of this desert town becomes the backdrop for unfathomable cruelty and sleaze . And there ’s nothing our Italian sandwich , J.J. Gittes ( Jack Nicholson ) , can do about it – the town is what it is , and ca n’t be changed even by our fantasies .
