Thom Andersen is a longtime teacher at the California Institute of the Arts, and his nearly three-hour documentary chronicling the relationship between Los Angeles and the cinema feels like an exhaustive and sometimes exhausting graduate-level course. Highly expansive in its approach and scope, Andersen's film is roughly divided into three parts, chronicling the city as a cinematic background; as a virtual character in films itself; and as the actual subject for such works as "Chinatown" and "L.A. Confidential." A look at the use of the city's modernist architecture as locations for the homes of an endless parade of cinematic villains, for instance, starts out in jovial fashion before becoming a thoughtful philosophical examination of societal resistance to utopian dreams.

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