Boogie days (Image via MGM) To make a good movie, write what you know. To make a great movie, write what someone else knows and tease out the winning aspects that person might never see as clearly.
Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson's eighth feature, takes place in 1973, just three years after Anderson's birth. Yet — inspired by the stories of producer and former child actor Gary Goetzman — it unfurls with breathless authenticity, as if it could only be the filmmaker's own teenage diary.
In a way, the film is like its title, which is taken from a '60s-'80s Glendale record store; it is a reference you have to either know or figure out on your own, and nowhere in its namesake does Anderson waste time explaining any of the simultaneously