Review of Licorice Pizza (2021)
Seen in 2025.
Paul Thomas Anderson goes back slightly further than his Boogie Nights (1997), to the intersection of the US entertainment industry and the country’s hustler culture in 1973. There are no licorice pizzas in evidence, but a fumbling love story punctuated by humorous secondary characters. The best of these is Jon Peters, who is portrayed as an out-and-out psychopath. Curiously, the way Anderson sews up the romance is very anime. He does a series of tracking shots of the main characters running to help each other, then running to find each other, with flashbacks to how they previously ran to help each other.