How Did This 27-Year-Old Thriller Get Declared The Best Movie Ever By Rotten Tomatoes?

Out of all the classic movies that might have been crowned champion, it’s L.A. Confidential, an almost 30-year-old movie, that was recently surprisingly declared the best movie of all time by Rotten Tomatoes.

L.A. Confidential Is #1 On Rotten Tomatoes’ Best Movies Of All Time List

Rotten Tomatoes Used A Complicated System To Assess

Rotten Tomatoes recently released its 300 Best Movies of All Time list, ranking the top 300 movies. Of all the movies that might have won it, it’s 1997’s crime noir thriller L.A. Confidential that took the top spot. On the surface, this is an odd choice. There’s no doubt that L.A. Confidential is an excellent movie, but best of all time seems like a stretch, especially when considering it beat out films like Casablanca (#3) and The Godfather (#2). It also beat other films that have a 100% Rotten Tomatoes critics score compared to L.A. Confidential‘s 99%, such as Seven Samurai, Toy Story and Toy Story 2, Singin’ in the Rain, 12 Angry Men, and more.

Rotten Tomatoes employed a rigorous methodology to determine its ranking:

“How did we select and rank the movies? First, every movie here is Certified Fresh. Then we applied our recommendation formula, which considers a movie’s Tomatometer rating with assistance from its Audience Score, illuminating beloved sentiment from both sides. Critics-certified, audience-approved! Other factors weighing into the recommendation formula: a movie’s number of critics reviews, the number of Audience Score votes, and its year of release. An editorial pass is reserved to finesse the final list, which included minimum thresholds for each of these data points.”

Rotten Tomatoes’ methodology makes for a list that balances quality films with a few surprises, making sure that it’s not merely a repeat of every other best films of all time rankings. The entire list is well worth perusing simply to see where some land, and which ones were surprisingly left off, like Vertigo and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Some are unexpected, and some movies anyone might guess would be on a 10-spot list.

How L.A. Confidential Became Rotten Tomatoes’ Best Movie Of All Time

L.A. Confidential Was In A Sweet Spot Between Old And New

While it’s impossible to know exactly how Rotten Tomatoes weighted their ranking, it appears movies from newer eras were weighted a little more heavily than movies from previous generations. That makes sense. Best movie of all time rankings tend to skew heavily in favor of classic movies, simply due to longevity, nostalgia, and historical impact. Though valid, those measurement criteria tend to lead to repetitive rankings that don’t change much. In ranking the films like this, RT has allowed newer movies to break through the classic movie bias and mix things up.

On this list, movies released before the 1980s have fewer reviews to select from, and they came out at a time before the internet and verified Rotten Tomatoes ratings. They simply don’t have as much to work with in terms of ratings and reviews. More recent movies on their list tend to be drawn from franchises, preexisting IP, and tentpole blockbusters. L.A. Confidential’s late 1990s release is in something of a sweet spot regarding timing: it has far more reviews than the other classic movies that rank in the top spots, but isn’t so new that recency bias (or reverse bias, in this case) worked against it. It could be that L.A. Confidential ranks in the top spot because it perfectly straddles the line between old and new, mimicking an old noir style while reaping the benefits of both without the drawbacks.

Why L.A. Confidential Has 99% On Rotten Tomatoes

Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential Is A Truly Great Movie

Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential would rightly be put on any great movie list, with it being one of the few neo-noir crime thrillers that doesn’t start sliding into pulp territory. It’s taut and gripping; author James Ellroy’s 1990 novel made a perfect adaptive jump to the big screen, with the script by Hanson and Brian Helgeland being universally praised by critics. The cast is absolutely stacked with stars at the height of their fame in the 1990s, as well as new stars: L.A. Confidential, after all, was Russell Crowe’s breakout American role. Other cast members include Kim Basinger, Kevin Spacey, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, Danny DeVito, and David Strathairn, a great balance of A-list stars and notable character actors.

The cast’s acting and writing aren’t the only highlights of the film, however. Critics also lauded Hanson’s direction, Jerry Goldsmith’s score, and Peter Honess’ editing. Of the 165 critics’ reviews currently on Rotten Tomatoes for L.A. Confidential, only one is a rotten score with the rest being fresh. Plenty of praise went to how Hanson captured the steamy noir feel of the seedy underbelly of midcentury Los Angeles while also fully realizing the characters. The late, great Roger Ebert, for example, called L.A. Confidential “film noir, and so it is, but it is more: Unusually for a crime film, it deals with the psychology of the characters … It contains all the elements of police action, but in a sharply clipped, more economical style; the action exists not for itself but to provide an arena for the personalities.”

Is L.A. Confidential Really The Best Movie Of All Time?

The Best Films Inspire Debate Long After Their Release

Some highly-regarded movies are only considered classics upon being reevaluated after decades, but L.A. Confidential doesn’t suffer from being a movie that wasn’t appreciated in its time. It was a critical and commercial success at the time of its release, making $126 million on a $35 million budget. It was nominated for a whopping nine Academy Awards, winning two, with Basinger’s win for Best Supporting Actress being a special standout. Had it not gone up against the juggernaut that was James Cameron’s Titanic that year, L.A. Confidential might have made off with at least half a dozen more Oscars by the end of the night.

For its craftsmanship and commercial impact, L.A. Confidential was selected in 2015 to be archived in the National Film Registry, an honor reserved for films that are deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” It’s only one of three movies ever to sweep the “Big Four” critics’ awards, being awarded the top prize that year by the National Society of Film Critics, National Board of Review, L.A. Film Critics Association, and New York Film Critics Circle. Considering the other two movies to achieve that impressive feat were Schindler’s List and The Social Network, L.A. Confidential is in rare company.

Despite that, it’s hard to agree with Rotten Tomatoes’ assessment that L.A. Confidential is the best movie of all time. It’s certainly one of the best, but it lacks the cultural staying power of some of the other older movies on the list that are still quoted and referenced today. It also wasn’t the influential powerhouse on movies that came after in the way certain films have been, such as Citizen Kane or any of Hitchcock’s classics. It could be said it doesn’t even belong on a Top 10 list of all-time best movies, but, again, that’s arguably only because humans tend to give too much weight to older classics. However, that’s the fun of movies: the great ones continue to inspire debate and lively assessment decades after their release.