At first glance, the prospect of “cinematic art” today seems more remote than ever. With the business strategies of the corporate studios organized around generating a few big blockbusters per year, increasingly in the form of endless sequels and spinoffs, making art hardly seems to fit into the logic of Hollywood film production.

This dreary state of affairs was brilliantly satirized in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman. And now Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice provides further hope that another cinema is possible.

Anderson consistently manages to craft compelling films that push beyond what has been done before and what his peers are doing now. Indeed, it is all too common for directors to slip comfortably into continually remaking their “greatest hits” — just look at Wes Anderson, whose cute and cuddly storybook worlds exude the same mix of cynical detachment, conceit, and insincerity while rehashing thematically the central importance of fatherhood in generating meaning in our lives; or the Coen Brothers, who have remade Homer’s Odyssey a dozen or more times at this point, albeit with different quirky little characters.