shaggy-dog story

A shaggy-dog story ensues: Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Robbins take some trash to the city dump, but, finding it closed, leave it in a ravine instead.

This particular shaggy-dog story gets very shaggy, and at times it’s not clear whether Buckley himself knows where he wants the narrative to go.

He’s too rigorous a thinker to fall back on facile antagonisms between art and commerce, and too generous an entertainer to saddle a zigzagging shaggy-dog story with didacticism.

“Licorice Pizza”: Paul Thomas Anderson’s shaggy-dog story of self-discovery in ’70s San Fernando Valley feels to me like a loose, easy-breathing culmination for Anderson, a virtuoso filmmaker here at his most tender and organic.

The cumulative charms of these narrative byways fade as Koberidze’s meandering extends to two and a half hours, though the end section is glorious and there’s much to appreciate about a movie that reminds you that at times the best parts of a shaggy-dog story are the ostensibly pointless ones.