5 Best Paul Thomas Anderson Movies, Ranked From Good to Great
From a meditative thriller about oil production to the personal story of a genius.
Paul Thomas Anderson never ceases to amaze with the genre diversity of his work. Determining which of his films deserve to be called his best is a truly difficult task.
5. Phantom Thread, 2017
In Phantom Thread, the director weaves with unprecedented aestheticism the story of Reynolds Woodcock, a famous fashion designer, grumpy and complex, always searching for inspiration, losing it, only to find it again.
Anderson offers a compelling portrait of the author, a man who is by default extraordinary and morally ambiguous. Through his codependent and toxic relationship with Alma, a former waitress, the director reveals the vulnerability of creative nature.
4. Boogie Nights, 1997
Paul Thomas Anderson's tragicomic portrait of the '70s and '80s porn industry is unusually paradoxical.
Despite its frivolous subject matter, the success story of a simple guy named Eddie is torn between a drama about finding a family and a disappointing farce about the death of an entire era and its figures.
Boogie Nights is a movie of epic proportions, encompassing the lives of dozens of people and reviving the spirit of a lost era.
3. Magnolia, 1999
An epic three-hour canvas – and perhaps Paul Thomas Anderson's most complex film. In Magnolia, he presents a kaleidoscope of disparate stories and human destinies that keep colliding in the strangest ways.
The director's ability to take the particular and make it big, the narrow and specific, and make it universal is a very important skill.
In Magnolia, Anderson also reveals himself to be a comedic director and a magical realist: few who have seen it will forget the great scene in which, in the movie's most dramatic moment, frogs suddenly start falling from the sky.
2. The Master, 2012
The Master captures the national spirit and reinterprets the traumas of the post-war period and the confusion of the citizens that led to the emergence of new religions.
If the main conflict of There Will Be Blood was the confrontation between religion and capitalism, The Master goes to the metaphysical conflict between the human desire to be free and the dependence that forces him to remain in a subordinate position.
It is often said that The Master is simply a clever mockery of Scientology – in part it is, but that is only a small part of what this complex portrait of one of the most important periods in the country's history offers.
1. There Will Be Blood, 2007
Paul Thomas Anderson's most important film is a historical epic about Daniel Plainview, an oilman whose gradual enrichment parallels his moral decline.
Like the original novel, Anderson's film turns the idea of the American Dream and the ideal of the self-made businessman on its head.
In There Will Be Blood, wealth equals immorality, and the pursuit of money leads to the death of the individual. This is a terrifying and terribly beautiful movie with one of Daniel Day-Lewis' best performances, for which he rightly won an Oscar.