Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

RyothChatty ridiculous rating

Aedonerre I gave this film a 9 out of 10, because it was exactly what I expected it to be.

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Tweekums Set in the early nineteen fifties this film follows the 'Hat Squad'; four LAPD detectives willing to do whatever it takes, including murder, to rid the City of Angels of organised crime. Then one day they are called in when a woman's body is found outside the city; she is half buried and just about every bone is broken as if she was pushed off a cliff but there are none around. She is Alison Pond who we soon learn was involved with Detective Lieutenant Maxwell Hoover, the leader of the squad. Not long after they start investigating somebody sends in a reel of film which shows Alison and a man in a compromising position. He is soon identified as a general in charge of the US Atomic Energy Commission. He has an alibi for the time she died but as pressure from above is applied to Hoover and his squad it looks as though Alison was killed because she saw something she wasn't meant to; what that is remains a mystery though.I really enjoyed this film; it provided an interesting mystery and great atmosphere. As others have said it doesn't just feel like a film set in the fifties, it feels almost like a film made them. The cast does a great job; Nick Nolte is on top form as Hoover and Chazz Palminteri, Michael Madsen and Chris Penn impress as the other members of the Hat Squad. There are also solid performances from Jennifer Connelly and Melanie Griffith and Alison and Hoover's wife Katherine. The story unfolds at a good pace and while the identity of the killer isn't a total surprise and the mystery of how Alison came to die seemed pretty obvious it didn't really matter as the big question as to why she was killed wasn't obvious at all. At the end things do get a bit melodramatic but that goes with the genre. There are some fairly violent scenes and some fairly tame sex scenes; I was surprised that it was given a UK-18 certificate though... unless there was something I missed I suspect it would be given a 15 if it were rated today. Overall I'd certainly recommend this to fans of neo-noir films; the story of good and the atmosphere is great.

thefuzzydan Mulholland Falls shares a trait with another 90's film, Backdraft, in that both films have excellent casts, a good story but suffer from some of the worst dialogue ever put in a motion picture. Every thought a characters has is spoken on screen. Every line is written with no more substance than what is immediately on the surface. And every single attempt at humor is telegraphed so far in advance that the punchlines fall flatter than Jennifer Connelly from a plane.It is almost heartbreaking watching stellar actors like Nolte, Palminteri, Malkovich and Dern spit out lines that sound like a fifth-grader wrote them. It is all the more shameful that the central mystery of the film is a rather intriguing one and not easily solved in advance.Mulholland Falls is potentially great film that, due to lack of a good script doctor, turned out to be just painful to watch.

mgtbltp The Wild West circa 1950s....This film reminds you not only of all the "B" LA/Desert based crime Noir films but it also channels a very strong updated Western vibe with its quasi legal vigilante justice story line. Endorsed by the "chief" a nice cameo by Dern, the un-officially sanctioned Hat Squad, Hoover (Nolte), Coolidge (Palminteri), Hall (Madsen), and Relyea (Penn) are like modern day Earp Brothers riding around the boulevards of broken dreams in the ultimate Western "boom" town, The City of Angels, "tinsel town", LA. Their mission is to keep the vice rackets under local control and their territory/turf runs from the desert ranges of the Cal/Nev border country to the Pacific rim. Their targets are any organized crime mobsters from the Mid West or East Coast who they sort of run out of town by sundown by escorting them to Mulholland Falls, sort of like Niagara Falls without the water.spoilersHoover makes you think of Dashiell Hammett's Continental OP, a big imposing stocky cross between Noir icons Sterling Hayden and Raymond Burr. He wields justice with a sap, again reminiscent of the way Wyatt Earp would coldcock outlaws with his Buntline special, and re-enforcing the films Wild West vibe. His partner Coolidge reminds you of Joseph Calleia's character in Touch of Evil, is a slightly neurotic transplanted Easterner, the squads methods of vigilante justice are effecting his life to the point to where he is seeing a female psychiatrist. The attempts by Coolidge to deal with old school Hoover's wild mood swings and his admonitions to the squad about how they agreed that they weren't going do this or that again are quite humorous. Hall and Relyea are both more laconic, though Hall is the cockier of the two. When the squad about to launch a victim off the "falls" mobster: You can't do this this is America. Hoover: This ain't America, this is LA...The catalyst to the decent into Noirsville is when the squad is sent to investigate the body of a woman who is embedded face down into the ground at a housing development in the hills above LA. She looks like she was run over by a steam roller, and when she is pried out and turned over her identity is known to Hoover who is visibly shaken. His reaction is noticed by his squad mates. An autopsy indicates that she fell from a great height, like a cliff, but there are no cliffs at the site. An X-Ray has a curious blank section caused by a radio active piece of glass. Back at headquarters a film canister arrives addressed to Hoover and a screening reveals a stag film spliced with shots of a desert resort, a military instillation, a hospital ward and soldiers at a tactical atomic bomb test.The stag film shows the films equivalent to the femme fatale, Allison Ponds (Connelly) a love goddess, fatal in one way or another to all the men she touches. Connelly is like a brunette Marilyn Monroe and she displays her assets in all their glory. Allison in the film is screwing an unknown man, Hoover's reaction to the film spurs Coolidge to confront him about the girls identity, and Hoover confesses to having a six month affair with Allison, a high priced prostitute. In flashback we see Hoover, during a raid on an after hours club, walk in on Allison bitch slapping a pimp who was about to shoot the teen aged girl laying on a bed behind her with junk. Hoover over doses the pimp dead with his own needle. Allison's best friend and neighbor is Jimmy Fields (McCarthy), a gay photographer, he sent the film footage to Hoover as both evidence of a government cover-up (the reason he thinks that Allison was killed) and for protection from her killers. He confesses to the existence of other films indicating that he also has a film of Hoover with Allison.The radioactive glass and the film sends the squad like a posse, riding across the desert to a Nevada test site in a 49 Buick Roadmaster. This beautifully filmed sequence strongly enforces the contemporary modern setting with the classic Hollywood Western replacing horses with automobiles, while at the same time evoking classic era Western US Noirs.Classic Noir locations used are the Los Angels City Hall, the Pacific Coast at Malibu, Desert Hot Springs, and Mulholland Drive. The film adds to that list a neat googie style apartment with pool and what has to be a unique instantly iconic neo noir location, the Sedan Crater in Nevada, a spooky nuclear bomb test site. The nuclear test angle of the story is a nod to Kiss Me Deadly but I've read that the films original ending was for Hoover and Coolidge, after surviving an emergency landing too near a test site, were to be incinerated by a nuclear blast. Now how utterly noir would that have been?I say I like it better than LA Confidential, and more every time I watch it. The Cinematography by Haskell Wexler (In The Heat Of The Night) is gorgeous.It got the hats right, it has a nice rendition of "Harbour Lights" by Aaron Neville, you gotta love that Buick Roadmaster convertible tooling across the gorgeous desert landscapes and also Jennifer Connelly's boobs. I guess you gotta find out these things for yourself rather than go by critics, it's the reason I never checked it out. WTF were they thinking? Is it because almost nobody wears fedoras anymore or drive dinosaur gas guzzlers?, or was it because the cast was all adults and smoking is frowned upon, who knows. It reminds you of all the LA based crime Noirs. The only small fault is Nolte's mumbling, it's hard to understand him at times. Nice enough score by Dave Grusin 9/10

museumofdave I've found that if I somehow leave the room for food or a break, the film probably isn't really very good. Good or better keep me glued. I never left my seat during Mulholland Falls and from the opening sequences with the four LA cops in hats riding up sunny 1950's Hollywood Hills in a big black convertible, I was hooked.Hooked especially by a galvanizing, snappy performance by Nick Nolte as Hoover, head of his squad of four, a man of action before words, a man who simmers and glares and loves with passion: it's a performance that somehow should have been given more attention at the time of the film's release, a cops and crime film which somehow didn't match the zeitgeist of its period, lost in the shuffle.Almost every noir mystery past 1949 is a retread of some sort (Chinatown being a major exception),but what makes Mulholland Falls work is not the plot but the heady collection of dedicated supporting actors whether Melanie Griffith as a quietly restrained wife of a cop, or Chazz Palminteri, the wry right hand partner who talks about his psychiatrist without hesitation.The mystery deals with corruption in high places, of course, and John Malkovich and Treat Williams are good supports for Nolte to play against--but it's Nolte's show from start to finish and his intensity nails it!