In 1970, drug-fueled Los Angeles detective Larry "Doc" Sportello investigates the disappearance of a former girlfriend.
It is a film so rich and deep that one imagines subsequent viewings will yield many more gems.
If not quite on a par with PTA’s best, this is still a richly intoxicating brew of humour, violence and melancholy.
Too unpredictable to be dull, but don’t mistake the film’s incomprehensible plotting for complexity; this is an exercise in pot smoke and mirrors.
Take it from us — ignorance is bliss. The less you try to figure out Anderson’s rambling, mesmerising mystery, the better. Just relax and let this beautiful, haunting, hilarious, chaotic, irritating and possibly profound tragicomedy wash over you. There is nothing else out there like it.
Inherent Vice is its own enjoyably badly behaved beast; it's a film that moves at a pothead's pace and trades revelations for anticlimaxes. However, tune into its wavelength and you'll dig it just fine.
Joaquin Phoenix and Owen Wilson star in a brilliant and strange modern Hollywood noir.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Pynchon’s stoner detective story is film-making of a higher order.
A buoyant film about deep sadness and political disquiet, and quite the most fucked-up love story out there.
Verdict: Inherent? Incoherent, more like.
Funny, exasperating, thought–provoking and wilfully eccentric.
Beautiful but hazy shades of Pynchon.
Poignant adaptation.
I found myself going with it for about two thirds of the time, seduced by its sweetness, suspicious of its sexuality (there’s no Dirk Diggler appendage here to offset the liberal displays of female flesh), occasionally exasperated by its incessant shaggy-doggedness.
Paul Thomas Anderson: 'Inherent vice is like a sweet, dripping aching for the past'
Edinburgh Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Friday March 6, 2015, until Tuesday March 10, 2015. More info: www.filmhousecinema.com
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