FILMS

LICORICE PIZZA Ever since Paul Thomas Anderson reinvented himself as the new dark genius of American cinema, he’s been disinclined to let his hair down. Films like There Will Be Blood, The Master and Phantom Thread are works of formidable brilliance – but they’re not what you’d call insouciant. So comes as a surprise, and a delight. A coming-of-age comedy set in Encino, Los Angeles in the mid-’70s, it stars newcomer Cooper Hoffman – son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman – as Gary, a 15-year-old former child actor branching out bullishly into entrepreneurship, while falling for Alana, a woman 10 years or so his senior. He basically sales-talks her into becoming his friend and companion, and while maintaining a platonic relationship, they sail together through a series of comic misadventures – a waterbed franchise, political campaigning, run-ins with Hollywood crazies (Sean Penn as a macho actor, Bradley Cooper deranged as Barbra Streisand’s hairdresser-turned-mogul boyfriend Jon Peters, Tom Waits basically just Waitsing to the hilt).