CITY Screen, York, will be showing Paul Thomas Anderson’s crime comedy-drama Inherent Vice (15) from January 30 and has teamed up with What’s On and producers Warner Bros Pictures for a competition with 1970s-themed prizes.

Anderson’s seventh feature is the first film adaption of a Thomas Pynchon novel.

The storyline spins around private eye Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), whose ex-old lady shows up with a story about her billionaire land developer boyfriend and a plot by his wife and her boyfriend to kidnap that billionaire and throw him in a looney bin.

This is the tail end of the psychedelic Sixties, when paranoia is running the day, and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around, like “trip” or “groovy”, that is being way too overused. Except this one usually leads to trouble.

Thrown into Into the maelstrom are hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, LAPD detectives, a tenor sax player working undercover, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists. Part surf noir, part psychedelic romp, Inherent Vice is all Thomas Pynchon and now all Paul Thomas Anderson too.

Phoenix also starred in the Californian director’s last movie, 2012’s The Master, and is joined in Anderson’s cast by Josh Brolin as LAPD detective Bigfoot Bjornsen and Katherine Waterston as Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shesta Fay Hayworth, along with Reese Witherspoon and Owen Wilson.

Anderson’s past films have included 2007’s There Will Be Blood, 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love, 1999’s Magnolia and 1997’s Boogie Nights; you can view a trailer of his new work on Youtube at youtube.com/watch?v=UIX830h6ueA.

One What’s On reader can win a Warner Bros/Inherent Vice prize package of Thomas Pynchon’s book, a vintage book cover T-shirt and puka shell necklace with a medallion.

• Question: Inherent Vice is the second time Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon have appeared together in a film, after the 2005 biography of country musician Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter Cash, for which she won a Best Actress Oscar. What was that movie called?

Send your answer with your name, address and daytime phone number, on a postcard, to Charles Hutchinson, Inherent Vice Competition, The Press, 76-86 Walmgate, York, YO1 9YN, or by email to charles.hutchinson@nqyne.co.uk, by next Friday. Usual competition rules apply.

Meanwhile, City Screen will have three 1970s-style cocktails on offer in The Riverside Bar named after characters in the film: The Doc Sportello (otherwise known as a Grasshopper), The Bigfoot Bjornsen (Old Fashioned), and The Shesta Fay Hepworth (Tequilla Sunrise).