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“Lost” was not a show that bothered much with sense in order to achieve its effects, and “Duster,” though it involves a far-reaching conspiracy whose payoff plays like the end of a shaggy-dog story, is a show of effects, of set pieces and sequences, of car chases and fistfights, of left-field notions and characters.

A shaggy-dog story ensues: Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Robbins take some trash to the city dump, but, finding it closed, leave it in a ravine instead.

This particular shaggy-dog story gets very shaggy, and at times it’s not clear whether Buckley himself knows where he wants the narrative to go.

He’s too rigorous a thinker to fall back on facile antagonisms between art and commerce, and too generous an entertainer to saddle a zigzagging shaggy-dog story with didacticism.

“Licorice Pizza”: Paul Thomas Anderson’s shaggy-dog story of self-discovery in ’70s San Fernando Valley feels to me like a loose, easy-breathing culmination for Anderson, a virtuoso filmmaker here at his most tender and organic.