There Will Be Blood

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

There Will Be Blood

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (R)

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Paul Thomas Anderson’s “enthralling and powerfully eccentric American epic” is one of the best films in years, said David Denby in The New Yorker. Opening on Dec. 26, it tells how Daniel Plainview, a turn-of-the-20th-century prospector, claws his way to wealth as an oil tycoon. Plainview represents all the “entrepreneurial energy and ruthlessness” that built America from its rough frontier beginnings and, as thrillingly embodied by Daniel Day-Lewis, the character is violent, self-indulgent, and fascinating. There Will Be Blood both looks and sounds extraordinary, said Todd McCarthy in Variety. Anderson’s script captures the ornate cadences of early 20th-century America with startling immediacy, and cinematographer Robert Elswit renders the beauty of both “parched landscapes” and industrial milieus. Throbbing in the background is the “daring, adventurous” symphonic score of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. But Day-Lewis is the reason to watch, said David Fear in Time Out New York. The actor has dominated the screen in such star-filled epics as Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. “Yet that still doesn’t prepare you for the performance he gives here.” Plainview is plainly a psychopath, but Day-Lewis lets us see his weaknesses and demons as well as his “displays of dog-barking and slurred promises of throat-slitting.” His assured craft helps Anderson, likewise, take his art to a whole new level. His previous films Boogie Nights and Magnolia were good. But they “never hinted that he had a movie this complex and epic in him.”