Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
The story of Gary Valentine and Alana Kane growing up, running around and going through the treacherous navigation of first love in the San Fernando Valley, 1973.
Licorice Pizza is Paul Thomas Anderson at his most freewheeling and personal — a shaggy, episodic coming-of-age romance set in the San Fernando Valley of 1973 that feels genuinely one-of-a-kind in its loose, anecdotal structure and sun-drenched nostalgia. Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman deliver remarkable debut performances, carrying the film's meandering energy with naturalistic charm. Anderson's cinematography is luminous and tactile, evoking the period with warmth and specificity rather than pastiche. The film's novelty lies in its refusal of conventional narrative momentum — it's a series of vivid vignettes rather than a tightly plotted story, which is both its greatest strength and a limitation. The plot, while deliberately episodic, can feel aimless to a fault, with tonal lurches (the Bradley Cooper gas crisis sequence, the Joel Wachs subplot) that don't always cohere. The ending, while emotionally resonant in the moment, resolves the central relationship in a way that feels abrupt and somewhat unearned given how elliptically the dynamic has been developed throughout.