Movie people love to debate their little movie rankings, and directors like Paul Thomas Anderson inspire particularly varied (and seemingly endless) evaluations, reconsiderations, and reshufflings all across the internet, and presumably also still in some bars and college dorms for those more inclined to actually socialize. Any number of movies can contend for PTA’s top spot – I even know a guy who puts Hard Eight at number one, though I’m not sure he’s swept the corners on the filmography, there – and that’s sometimes true even for a single person of otherwise firmly held tastes and beliefs. There Will Be Blood seems like the obvious, sensible choice, yet it’s hard to match the gravitational pull I personally feel toward Magnolia. (It helps to see it when you’re 19.) In recent years, though, there’s no Anderson movie I’ve rewatched more than Licorice Pizza. It might be my actual favorite. And I think I’ve arrived there the same way that some fans might arrive at Boogie Nights, Anderson’s wunderkind attention-getter that I’ve come to consider solidly inferior to the problematic age-gap one.

Hear me out. Boogie Nights, a portrait of the Los Angeles porn industry in the 1970s and ’80s is obviously excellent, full of iconic performances, crackerjack scenes, and virtuoso tracking shots. So many tracking shots! Yes, there’s the famous first one that catches the movie’s title on a physical marquee, vaguely imitating Scorsese’s famous Copacabana shot from Goodfellas. But there are plenty more where that came from, sequences where it sometimes feels as if the characters exist primarily to be surveyed by Anderson’s camera during endless party scenes, captured for half a minute, then recaptured as the shot circles back around.

There’s plenty of this in my beloved Magnolia, too, and to some it probably feels more ostentatious in a movie that’s a solid 30 minutes longer, with even more characters, melodrama, and crazy flourishes. Magnolia, though, is all about sweeping its characters up in that melodramatic madness. With the fullness of time, Boogie Nights feels more concerned with showing off. Maybe that’s because all of its characters, no matter how vividly played and lovable, are pretty shallow by design. Plenty of the Scorsese and Altman movies Anderson is crossbreeding here (though here it’s way more Scorsese) make dumb decisions, and Anderson gives his Boogie Nights crew a touching sweetness, even innocence, that undercuts stereotypes about sex work. At the same time, much of the movie features not especially bright people digging in and trying to hang on to the one thing they’ve made money doing, getting high off a moderate amount of success, then panicking when the ground shifts beneath them. It all makes sense; it just doesn’t have a lot of depth beyond the sensational immediacy.

Still: I come here not to bury Boogie Nights, which also mostly rules, but to praise Licorice Pizza, which is even better. In it, Anderson revisits the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s, starting a little earlier in the pre-disco days, and returns to characters with a Boogie Nights level of youthful energy, fecklessness, and sometimes-vulgar naivete. The movie follows, with hazy chronology, the adventures of teenage actor and entrepreneur Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) alongside Alana Kane (Alana Haim), the directionless twentysomething woman Gary falls for almost immediately. It’s the one Anderson movie that plays like an unambiguous comedy; however uneasy its central sorta-romance between a nominal adult and a precocious teenager might make some viewers, it’s not as viscerally intense as the high-wire rom-com Punch-Drunk Love.

The more warmly nostalgic tone of Licorice Pizza seems like it should indicate a movie less challenging, less ambitious than Boogie Nights, where even the moony crushes (like the one Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Scotty nurses on Mark Wahlberg’s Dirk Diggler) have a tragic dimension. Instead, Anderson gathers the skill and confidence of an additional quarter-century of filmmaking to produce something deceptive in its wisdom about the criss-crossing worlds of the self-styled teenage prodigy and the adult adrift whenever she tries to enter the “real” world.

Throughout the movie, Alana’s attempts to connect with other adults, specifically adult men, fall disappointingly flat, and she retreats to the childhood home she still shares with her parents and sisters (played by the real-life Haim family; yes, that includes Alana’s bandmates in the pop-rock band that made her famous). Gary, meanwhile, approaches quasi-grown-up life with the carelessness, even selfishness, of a child. At times, their relationship has the disorientation of a body-swap comedy. Alana indulges Gary, then pushes him away; Gary showers Alana with attention, then reveals himself as kind of a dumb teenage boy. The Boogie Nights wunderkind made a movie about a shameless showoff, not actually based on Anderson’s childhood (he was a toddler during the movie’s timeline), but maybe his pieced-together quasi-recollection of what it might have been like. That displacement lends the movie a slightly dreamlike quality that Anderson keeps puncturing, hilariously sabotaging his own romantic imagery. When Alana runs against a crowd of kids, attempting to reach a mistakenly arrested Gary, her frustrated cry of “fuck off, teenagers!” is funny in its own youthful insolence – and for her attempt to assert herself as someone capable of growing into the next demographic up.  

Alana and Gary both have more depth than anyone in the Boogie Nights ensemble, and their misadventures aren’t freighted with such symbolic import, their lives not carefully charted across a watershed downturn moment (New Year’s Eve 1979, the switch from film to video, and so on). As highlighted in this insightful essay from Nick Pinkerton, Anderson has a tendency toward the diagrammatic, and the more freewheeling Licorice Pizza (the amount of time that passes during this movie – months? Years? – is a matter of debate) breaks free from that approach without leaning on oblique elisions. One Battle After Another is heavier material, but Anderson’s ability to deliver it without dragging the movie into a morass of import feels influenced by the effortlessness of his previous film.

Maybe it wasn’t, though. Maybe that was just a palate cleanser; it certainly doesn’t progress into One Battle as neatly as Boogie Nights leads into Magnolia. Then again, One Battle After Another is all about the vigorous idealism of youth, and whether it’s possible to make it to middle age with those feelings intact. In that context, Licorice Pizza may look even richer. Neither Licorice nor Boogie Nights reflects Anderson’s lived experience. But one of them feels significantly more lived-in.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.