Mulholland Falls is a 1996 American neo-noir crime thriller film directed by Lee Tamahori, written by Pete Dexter, and starring an ensemble cast featuring Nick Nolte, Jennifer Connelly, Chazz Palminteri, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Melanie Griffith, Andrew McCarthy, Treat Williams, and John Malkovich.

The squad leader, Lieutenant Maxwell Hoover, and his partners Ellery Coolidge, Eddie Hall, and Arthur Relyea are brought in to investigate the suspicious death of a young woman whose body was found at a construction site.

Their superior, Col. Fitzgerald, threatens to have the squad arrested and prosecuted for trespassing on a secret government facility, but the team is able to escape their predicament when the man in the film is identified as the civilian commander of the base, retired Gen. Thomas Timms.

Hoover realizes that Fields' film footage of Allison also includes images of "atomic soldiers", American servicemen who were unwillingly used by Fitzgerald as guinea pigs for A-bomb tests before being transferred to a secure military hospital ward on his orders; the colonel intends to let them die so he can avoid being held accountable.

The website's critics consensus reads: "Mulholland Falls' vacant characterizations and thin story undercuts its impressive cast and potent style, making for an empty exercise in noir posturing.

[6] Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, a fan of noir, liked Mulholland Falls, writing: 'This is the kind of movie where every note is put in lovingly.

But Mulholland Falls is so well cast and relentlessly stylish (thanks to some fine technical talent assembled here) that its sheer energy prevails over its shaky plot.

So this film has all the Chinatown staples—dangerous sex, corrupt power and a vast environment-damaging conspiracy—along with mushroom clouds, porn movies, a crash-landing airplane and many quick bursts of one-on-one violence.

This movie seems at times like an exercise in slow motion and in dull, cumbersome writing (the script is by novelist and former newspaper columnist Pete Dexter, who wrote the screenplay for Rush).

The CD contained 13 tracks including the old ballad, "Harbor Lights", written by Jimmy Kennedy and Hugh Williams, and sung by crooner Aaron Neville, who also performed the song in the film.