The Fox Is Guarding the Chicken Coop!

Rating: 9/10 (12 January 2010)

This is a great mood piece. It has a sense of time and place, not to mention some incredibly memorable characters. This is early Russell Crowe and he is really a movie presence. This has so many layers and yet it plays fairly. The people are multi-dimensional from James Cromwell, whom I love, to Kim Basinger, a really underrated actress. And, of course, Kevin Spacey is his solid self. I've seen so many portrayals of corrupt police forces and without a delicate touch, this could have been clichéd. It wasn't. We have a balance of show business and violence, drugs, you name it. We have an overzealous son of a cop who we start out hating and then begin to accept because he is driven in the right direction. I missed this the first time through during Titanic-mania, and I've always been turned off by the title (the tabloids of the fifties), but this doesn't fail to satisfy.