Licorice Pizza (2021)

Alana, with her silky slouch and ever-alert eyes, is a live-wire of understated contrasts. She’s the cigarette you shouldn’t smoke, the stop light you shouldn’t try to run. Haim plays everything behind the beat, even though Alana is always two or three steps ahead of everyone else, including Gary. She has her insecurities, but they’re a temporary state. Her impatience is a virtue—it stands to protect her from idiots.

Yet Licorice Pizza doesn’t give Alana Kane the ending she deserves. The movie wraps up with a pat wish-fulfillment fantasy rather than the tangy, bittersweet one it seems to be headed for. Why does the terrific girl always have to settle for the sweet but not quite adequate suitor, just because he’s trying the hardest? […] Licorice Pizza aims straight for the hearts of teenage boys everywhere, even the full-grown ones, pumping them full of hope and optimism. Just be yourself, and the woman of your dreams will eventually stop rolling her eyes and come around. It’s easy, really.

— Stephanie Zacharek (Time)

Anderson’s savviest move is to frame the early scenes through the iris of Gary’s puppy-love attraction, only to gradually cede more and more of the spotlight to Alana. What we come to see is that, on an emotional level, she’s something of a kid, too—someone reaching for an idea of adult life that remains as out of reach for her as it does for her literally adolescent admirer. Lots of American comedies are about resisting growing up. This one is about really wanting to and failing, perhaps triumphantly.

— A. A. Dowd (AV Club)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s ninth feature film, and his third set in California in the 1970s, takes its title from a fabled record store, based in SoCal during the same period. [But] the thing about a record is that when it’s serving its purpose it’s perpetually in motion; so too is Licorice Pizza.

[…]

The word that regularly comes up in descriptions of Licorice Pizza is “nostalgic,” an easy shorthand for the film’s retro look, its period authenticity, its gorgeously textured production design. [But] if you pay attention, there are fissures in this vision of unformed romance in the all-American endless summer. Anderson tries to dispense with the veneer of glamour. There are ugly sofas and corded phones in the kitchen, acne-dotted skin and imperfect teeth, the provincial tragedy of Alana Haim saying she “doesn’t really know” what Japanese food is. The film hints at sexism and racism [too], even if it only sometimes lands those efforts.

— Christina Newland (Reverse Shot)