Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Inherent Vice' to debut at New York festival

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, based on Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 crime novel, will debut at the New York Film Festival this October. The film, which reunites the director with Joaquin Phoenix (The Master) and also stars Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, and Benicio Del Toro, is scheduled to open in theaters on Dec. 12.

Vice will be the NYFF’s centerpiece gala screening, joining David Fincher’s Gone Girl—which is opening the 52nd festival on Sept. 26. According to Variety, which first reported the news, Vice will debut on Oct. 4.

“Every new Paul Thomas Anderson movie is an event, an experience—when the lights come up, you feel like you’ve been somewhere, and come back with your mind altered,” said Kent Jones, the New York Film Festival’s director. “Inherent Vice is a journey through the past, bringing the texture of the early ’70s SoCal counterculture back to full blown life. It’s a wildly funny, deeply soulful, richly detailed, and altogether stunning movie.”

Pynchon’s novel features a stoned L.A. private eye—half Philip Marlowe, half Jeff Lebowski—who gets mixed up with missing persons, drugs, and hookers. Phoenix plays the burnout, a perfectly named Doc Sportello, and Brolin plays a troublesome cop named Bigfoot Bjornsen.