Licorice Pizza
Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest is a romance about a teen boy wooing an older woman, starring two extraordinary newcomers and stuffed with fabulously hammy A-list cameos.
A grinningly fast-talking 15-year-old boy meets a bored 25-year-old woman who works as assistant to a photographer taking pictures for the high-school yearbook. She is in equal parts amused, intrigued and depressed when this kid starts hitting on her, until, she realises that she is somehow interested in him. Of course, the love between Gary and Alana, if love it is, does not run smooth.
This is lighter and sunnier than previous Anderson pictures; subtract the porn and indeed the sex from ‘Boogie Nights’ and you have something like it; remove the metaphysical anxiety from ‘Inherent Vice’ and that comes reasonably close, too. "an offbeat love story that manages to be sweet, hilarious, absurd – and wholly believable" The Guardian