“You’re a very powerful feeling,” one character tells another towards the end of Licorice Pizza. It’s a moment which feels like the film is describing itself. Paul Thomas Anderson’s ninth film is shaggy and shambolic but utterly lovable, equally as interested in mood and flavour as story and narrative. It’s a coming-of-age tale sketched with the kind of nostalgia that manifests as memories often do: messy and seemingly unformed, yet somehow deeply, ineffably profound, down to your bones.

Seemingly combining Anderson’s early, more freewheeling comedic approach (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) with his later, more formally ambitious efforts (Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread), it’s a thrilling culmination of his talents, a film he could have only made at this point in his ludicrously virtuoso career. If it bears any resemblance to another PTA joint, it would be Punch-Drunk Love; for Licorice Pizza is essentially an unconventional romantic comedy, starring two eccentric-outsider leads, of the kind who would have once seemed unthinkable as romantic-comedy leads.

Cannes Grand Prix winner Compartment No. 6 follows young Finnish archaeology student Laura, who is convinced by her lecturer and lover to take a trip to an ancient site of petroglyphs near the Arctic Circle. However, when she boards the long-distance train to take her there, she finds that she has to share her carriage with Ljoha, a foul-mouthed, misogynistic drunk travelling to his new job as a miner. Initially, they seem to have nothing in common, but the more time Laura spends with Ljoha the more he thaws, revealing an unforeseen kindness beneath the macho façade.

This chance meeting between the two occupants of compartment no. 6 brings about an awakening within them, forming a bond they will never forget.