Film Review – Inherent Vice

When Paul Thomas Anderson makes a movie, it’s an event. He’s proven his mastery time and again with efforts such as “Boogie Nights,” “Punch-Drunk Love,” and “There Will Be Blood,” consistently making quality, layered pictures that celebrate eccentricity, satire, and gut-rot emotions. 2012’s “The Master” found Anderson caught in his own webbing, displaying an uncharacteristic sterility with his provocative take on soulful unrest and religion. It was a handsomely mounted feature, but habitually indulgent in ways that seemed to stymie its creator. “Inherent Vice” continues Anderson’s creative decline, once again picking a project that isn’t cinematic, finding the production working diligently to create a rich, pot-infused odyssey into crime and seduction with a script that’s primarily dedicated to the trading of last names and laboriously following through on anticlimactic encounters. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com