Bella is really on a heater in this one. Disrupting lives and destroying the world around her with every move she makes. She has feelings!!! I can see why certain sloppy people in my life adored this series when they were younger.
I can't tell if I like or hate the world-building...
Strong four. Yuya Yagira gives one of *those* child performances: Grabs your heart and then squeezes it dry. Nobody Knows is gracefully paced and composed. Hirokazu Kore-eda is so good at his job. In emotionally destroying me, he is three for three. Shoplifters and Maborosi had sharper stabs but this was just constant agony.
This movie is all about its setting, that privileged window of time where life can feel open and just for you, where your possibilities dilate and collapse because of how a certain person might look at you. This can be a difficult and delicate place to set a story, because naive characters invite melodrama and insincerity. Licorice Pizza instead lands in that setting like a scoop of ice cream in soda, sinking and bobbing around and kicking up rich, sweet foam.
After a lifetime of hired-gun directing, Monte Hellman's daughter raised funds for him to shoot one last movie, one that would be truly his. What resulted is a heartfelt elegy and a once-in-a-lifetime javelin throw towards cinematic immortality. Hellman called Road to Nowhere his most personal film, and as he approached the end of his life he said it was the one film of his he wanted to show people; that after watching a minute or two it was the…
