City of Lies
- heavy
- bleak
- cold
Heavy, kinetic, measured crime / thriller, grounded in texture. Nihilistic, mid-stakes, cold, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →Los Angeles Police Department detective Russell Poole has spent years trying to solve his biggest case -- the murders of The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur -- but after two decades, the investigation remains open. Jack Jackson, a reporter desperate to save his reputation and career, is determined to find out why. In search of the truth, the two team up and unravel a growing web of institutional corruption and lies.
Our read · City of Lies (2018) reads as a heavy, kinetic, grounded crime · thriller · drama entry — measured in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, cold in temperature, nihilistic in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
More info & search links
The shape of City of Lies
What watching it is actually like.
“You want a dense LAPD corruption saga around unsolved rap icon murders.”
Skip it tonight — You lack patience for dual-timeline true-crime with no neat resolution.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself