Licorice Pizza: Age Is Just a Wonder

Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza

The heroes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza are always running, though they never seem to get anywhere. Their sprinting is heedless—the kind of panicked, exuberant racing that epitomizes the heightened quality of youth, when every crisis is life or death and every experience provokes either jubilation or disconsolation. They run and they run—across vacant golf courses and through crowded malls and down sunbaked streets—but they always end up back where they started, confused and angry and lost. They’re essentially attached to opposite ends of the same spoke, moving together in a constant circle, yet never coming any closer to their quixotic destination: each other.

This would seem to describe a doomed romance, a tragic love story that follows the trajectory of a Wong Kar-wai picture. Such a suspicion is only reinforced by the arc of Anderson’s filmography. He may be a more variable and omnivorous director than, say, his namesake Wes, but his movies tend to thrive on tension and conflict; the ruthless oil baron of There Will Be Blood, the fanatical cult leader of The Master, and the imperious fashion designer of Phantom Thread are all defined by their indomitable will, and his films derive their energy from the way their protagonists attempt to impose that will on a society that shackles and stifles them. So perhaps the happiest surprise of Licorice Pizza is how loose it is. Rather than straining to flatten us with grandiosity, Anderson has applied his considerable craft to a story that is warm, earnest, and relaxed. This is far from the weightiest effort of his career, but it may well be the sweetest. (The only real competition in that regard comes from the euphoric Punch-Drunk Love.) Read More

The Missing Pictures of 2014, Part II: Feat. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Latest Marvel

Joaquin Phoenix in "Inherent Vice"; Bradley Cooper in "American Sniper"; Jack O'Connell and Ben Mendelsohn in "Starred Up"; Timothy Spall in "Mr. Turner"

The Manifesto is ranking every movie from 2014. Before getting to our top 10, we’re supplementing our rankings with the handful of films we saw over the past month. This is the second installment of The Missing Pictures; the third will arrive tomorrow. And if you missed the first, you can find it here.

49. Mr. Turner (directed by Mike Leigh, 97% Rotten Tomatoes, 94 Metacritic). At one point in Mr. Turner, the film’s title character, played with glowering disdain by Timothy Spall, inquires about the mechanics of an invention called a camera. It’s a question that befits Turner’s intellectual curiosity, but it also carries a touch of irony, given that the movie’s director has been wielding a camera for the past several decades. Mr. Turner is not Leigh’s best film, but it may be his most exquisitely pictorial, and its painterly images (courtesy of Oscar-nominated cinematographer Dick Pope) might even satisfy the lofty standards of its protagonist.

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