Film Review – Licorice Pizza

For nearly two decades, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson went to a dark place. He dealt with corrosive, perverse characters in “There Will Be Blood,” “The Master,” “Inherent Vice,” and “Phantom Thread,” presenting grim conduct and bleak situations of domestic and psychological endurance. Anderson is back in a bubbly mood for “Licorice Pizza,” his return to the ways of idiosyncratic love and strange events, connecting to his time on “Punch-Drunk Love,” analyzing the weird ways of attraction and maturity. “Licorice Pizza” contains its fair share of oddity, as the helmer approaches the central relationship between a 15-year-old hustler and his 25-year-old object of desire from a variety of perspectives and tonal changes, detailing the craziness of impetuous behavior during the early 1970s. Anderson is attentive to the shaping of personalities, but his old impish ways make a return to the screen, delivering another cinematic triumph in a career that’s full of them. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com