Licorice Pizza

Another film big on the Top Ten and Sure Noms lists, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest, Licorice Pizza is a coming of age story set in San Fernando Valley in 1973. But don't let that scare you off.

The San Francisco Chronicle says "Watching Licorice Pizza is simultaneously like watching life with all the boring parts cut out and like watching movies with all the phony parts cut out."

So, nostalgia and anti-nostalgia at the same time? Works for us.

Gary (played by the son of the late Capri patron saint Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a 15-year-old guy who meets Alana, a 25-year-old photographer's assistant, and asks her out. Together they spend the rest of the movie in a screwball bonding act that takes them through the weirdness of Hollywood in the early 1970's. It's a time when everything seems possible, just as nostalgia tells us it was. Reality has other plans, but don't let it get in the way of the most entertaining romcom you'll see this year.