Paul Thomas Anderson’s films classified from the less good to the best
Soon thirty years of career for PTA and a new film in theaters, a battle after another, his tenth. The time for round accounts and the time or never to put order in the splendors of Anderson.
10 / Inherent Vice (2014)
A real headache, that one. We love his melancholy, his gags in a setback, his misty eroticism … Ten years later, however, it is clear that he did not become a bedside pta. When you are in a mood to hover in front of a Black Invited, there is more chances that we end up in front The Big Lebowski, Mulholland Drive or The private.
9 / Double Mise (1996)
The eternal forgotten, if only because you never know how to call it, between Double Mise (French title DVD), Hard Eight (imposed by the distributor, but who “sounds like porn “PTA: OU) Sydney (His name in Cannes in 96, and that prefers its author). The obsessions are already there, the talent too, but the beginner real has a little trouble transcending the shots of the Tarantinian thriller.
8 / Boogie Nights (1997)
A pastiche of Freedby a gifted copyist, with the small world of the Californian X in the role of the mafia. Often euphoric, but weighed down by Anderson’s trend to look high his characters, their ridiculous looks, their derisory dreams and their absence of talent. It’s not good to make fun.
7 / Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
After the excesses of Boogie Nights et Magnoliaa real-false exercise of humility, in the form of a small (1h35) romantic comedy. The energy spent by the film to underline its singularity and its eccentricity can type on the system. Yes, but Adam Sandler is tall, and the use of He Needs Me By Shelley Duvall (Homage to Master Altman), an enchanting musicality.
6 / Licorice Pizza (2021)
Son Roma. PTA reinvents the world of his childhood in a collage of tightrope walkers, stowed with juvenile charm, almost amateur, Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman. Turned at the bottom of his house, with friends … Almost a home-movie, a youthful cure, to avoid becoming an old master too quickly.
5 / Magnolia (1999)
The misfortunes, neuroses and hearts of heart of a handful of residents of Los Angeles, told as an epic. Great ideas are raining (like frogs), and too bad if emotion sometimes goes to forceps. “”This is the best film I will never make, for better and for worse “said PTA at the time. He was right: the best and the worst of his cinema are in this grand film.
4 / There will be blood (2007)
Anderson goes into the desert dialogue with the specters of Kubrick, Von Stroheim, Huston and a few others, to study the merciless struggle between oil capitalism and religious fundamentalism. Daniel Day-Lewis, as a madman, instantly between the history of cinema, and the film with him.
3 / Phantom Thread (2017)
The top of his vein Rom with. A love story against a background of mushroom omelettes between an obsessive artist and his rebel muse. Chuchoté cinema, caressing, far from the Californian show, which gives the impression of inventing itself as you look at it, on the (ghost) thread between over-mitrise and letting go.
2 / The Master (2012)
Semi-on-one crossing of America shattered by the 50s. Joaquin Phoenix plays the role of misfit As if he were Montgomery Clift. Certain flagship themes of the filmmaker (submission, domination, substitution families) find here their final expression, which does not prevent the film from being brilliantly irresolved, open, disjointed as a (bad) dream.
1 / One battle after another (2025)
We just discovered it. We may be delirious by placing it so high. Spielberg, who has already seen him three times, says he has “not laughed since Dr. FoLamour “. Enlightening comparison, the film being, like the Kubrick, a satire with insane energy – in this case, of the sick America inherited by the children of the 21st century. The best PTA? In moment T, yes.
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