[imagesource: Universal Pictures]

Since directing 2017’s Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson has been keeping busy making music videos for pop band Haim.

But now he is back with his ninth film, a wonderfully nostalgic surreal romance that has been given five-star reviews.

Licorice Pizza stars Cooper Hoffman (son of the late Anderson veteran Philip Seymour Hoffman) as Gary Valentine, an awkward and misguided child TV star falling for the much older Alana Kane (Haim’s Alana Haim).

Together they work through love’s tangled webs, orbited by a variety of friends and filmmakers including Bradley Cooper as an arrogant director, Sean Penn, Ben Stiller, Maya Rudolph, and John C. Reilly.

The title is not about terrible-sounding food, but rather the popular chain of Southern California record stores that brought customers in with promises of free liquorice alongside the latest vinyl releases.

Licorice Pizza has been lauded as both “seductively real” and one of Anderson’s “funniest and most relaxed film yet”.

Take a moment for the trailer:

The Telegraph notes how Licorice Pizza tells Gary and Alana’s story but somehow ends up “capturing the essence of an entire era by accident”, taking on a kind of “woozy clockwork”.

Here’s more from their five-star review:

You could call it a mellow screwball picaresque, or a gently surreal coming-of-age romance, but neither of those descriptions captures how fundamentally honest it all feels: even a roaringly funny running joke about a Japanese accent that’s bound to have Twitter in a snit has the ring of an absurd-but-true anecdote shared by a friend.

If you had to pin it down, its genre would be real life.

The Guardian, in also giving the film a five-star review, recognises how the movie “teeters between reality and nostalgist-hallucination,” mentioning as well how it is way too “interesting and complicated to be called ‘coming-of-age'” film:

This hypnotically gorgeous, funny, romantic movie freewheels its way around from scene to scene, from character to character, from setpiece to setpiece, with absolute mastery.

You float and ripple around it as if on a waterbed. But every casual line, kiss, automobile-ride, set-up and joke is a joy.

Licorice Pizza will kick off in UK cinemas from the start of the new year.

[sources:telegraph&guardian]