ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER Is the Movie of the Moment

With Inherent Vice, one of his best films, Paul Thomas Anderson established himself as a brilliant channeler of the particular poetic disappointments of America’s countercultures. That adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s seriocomic neo-noir by the same name takes the stoned sense of bleary, grim not-really-surprise–– at our nation’s corruption, its cynicism,