The director Paul Thomas Anderson has only made four films set in the present day. Save for that handful, and for a lovely detour to the United Kingdom, he has spent his career rooting around in the junk drawer of American history, exploring its madmen and prophets, its lost souls staggering through shellshocked post-war days.

The end-of-the-world party of Boogie Nights gave way to the primal horror of There Will Be Blood , then to The Master ’s portrait of the mid-20th-century spiritual hunger, then to the wastoid hippie-burnout of Inherent Vice. After taking some time to attend to matters of the heart in 2017’s Phantom Thread , Anderson chose to revisit the 1970s Los Angeles of Boogie Nights , only through Licorice Pizza ’s sentimental prism. He had, in some ways, clos

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