There Will Be Blood (DVD)

There can't be any doubt that Daniel Day Lewis is the finest actor modern cinema has ever seen, again on magnificent big hat and bristling mustache form here. You know you're seeing a great cinematic performance because you only see the character up on screen and not the actor, like DeNiro in Raging Bull, totally absorbed by that performance, Lewis unrecognizable here as a powerful and bloody-minded prospector in this biopic of the early US oil industry Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a fictitious character based on an amalgamation of the real life oil pioneers of the day, bombastic frontiersman Edward Doheny believed to be the main source. So powerful is ...  Read the complete review

It was a tough race in awards season this year with the Coen's A Country For Old Men coming out on top. The other main contender was Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, a film that quite rightly recognized the work of its lead actor Daniel Day Lewis with the Academy Award for Best Actor. The film is set in the late 1800's where a silver miner Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) turns his hand to drilling for oil on the barren landscapes of America. When a worker dies on one o his sites, he takes the man's orphaned son as his own, using him as a foil to elicit trust. Plainview starts to buy up land from struggling farmers and starts to really take control of ...  Read the complete review

Sitting here listening to the soundtrack as I write this, looking back on my experiences of watching this film, I'm wondering how I can possibly keep my review from simply turning into an undiluted rant of superlatives and non-stop praise. But then again why should I? I'm in awe of everything about this film. If you're prepared to accept its eccentricities and wild ambitions, Paul Thomas Anderson's Oscar-winning adaptation of the Upton Sinclair novel, Oil!, is a work of genius in so many areas. Chronicling the career of oil prospector Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis), the film begins with a fantastic 15 minute-long dialogue-free exercise in economical exposition, ...  Read the complete review

Recent months have proved to be interesting in cinema. There has been an unexpected explosion of artistic freedom in many films, and in this time there seems to have been a revival of the Western genre. The revival, however, has been unconventional, since the "Westerns" in question arguably don't constitute as westerns, namely the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. The latter particularly challenges the genre it apparently represents, and in this way, Paul Thomas Anderson has painted a picture that is totally unique, a rarity that is entirely in a league of its own. It pushes these genre ...  Read the complete review

Brilliant as he is, the "auteur" tag flung about in relation to Paul Thomas Anderson from at least Boogie Nights has always seemed a touch premature. Yes, those films were astounding, but could were they REALLY the work of a wholly unique voice? The truth is, Boogie Nights was the best film Martin Scorsese never made and Magnolia could've easily fallen from Robert Altman's fingers (albeit with a touch of post-MTV sheen). Only Punch Drunk Love, his fourth feature, felt in any way distinctive (and even it had a fair wallop of the Kubrick's about it). With There Will Be Blood, though, Anderson has crafted a film that truly feels like it ...  Read the complete review