Licorice Pizza
Directed by
Paul Thomas Anderson ★★★★
An offbeat love story unfolds in 1973 L.A.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s new coming-of-age comedy is “one of the very best movies of the year,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire.com. The director of Boogie Nights returns to 1970s California to capture and celebrate an unlikely connection that sparks between an on-the-make 15-year-old child actor and the 20-something woman he meets during his high school yearbook photo shoot. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper is magnetic as Gary, the pimply overconfident teen. But it’s his counterpart, Alana Haim’s Alana Kane, who emerges as one of Anderson’s greatest characters. Once Alana agrees to meet Gary later on for a drink, the plot of this “thoroughly hilarious” film “unfolds with the logic and snowballing momentum of a stand-up comedy set.” In truth, the story “barely hangs together,” said A.A. Dowd in AVClub.com. As Gary and Alana start a waterbed business, then a pinball palace, against the backdrop of 1973’s oil embargo and other period touchstones, Anderson seems like he’s simply riffing, “to sporadically satisfying effect.”Along the way, we do get cameos from Sean Penn, Tom Waits, and Bradley Cooper, who’s priceless as a coked-out lothario. During the film’s loose second half, “I felt a surge of gratitude every time Haim appeared,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. “More than Gary’s coming of age, it’s Alana’s spiky navigation of the world that keeps you glued.”
And Haim, who’s better known as a rock star who performs with her sisters, “makes one of the most exciting screen debuts in recent memory.” Her performance as a cool, acerbic young woman who never stops questioning herself for hanging out with Gary “marks the arrival of a fully formed screen star.” (In theaters only)