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The Films of Paul Thomas Anderson Ranked

Anderson is a portraitist who specializes in characters with longings that they can barely understand.

Paul Thomas Anderson Films Ranked
Photo: MGM

The words “phantom thread” could figure in the title of every film by Paul Thomas Anderson, a portraitist of insularity who specializes in characters with longings that they can barely understand, the fulfillment of which always seem just out of reach. Spanning various periods in American history, with a recent stop off in London, Anderson’s films are intimate political parables, imagining what the postwar disenfranchisement of the 1950s or the spiritual hangover of the 1970s and 1980s might’ve felt like from the inside of some of society’s most celebrated as well as most troubled and disrespected people.

Boogie Nights and Magnolia are still touted in certain nostalgic quarters as Anderson’s best films, but they’re actually his least typical—experiments in adapting others’ sensibilities, undertaken by a young and unusually gifted artist. Those films are declarative, while Anderson’s aesthetic is truly emboldened by the pathos of recession—represented by tight framing, quietly incredible camera pirouettes, and curtly fanciful and flamboyantly loaded dialogue that suggests submerged or unknowable information.

Anderson’s sense of community, which is shown to both affirm and attack a man’s sense of self, has undergone a seismic change over the years. The families of Boogie Nights and Magnolia are overstuffed with a screenwriter’s sense of quirk, where There Will Be Blood is contrived in its elemental sparseness. Then came The Master, in which fullness and sparseness were merged, rendering on screen an America of impenetrable myths and secrets, which is understood to have been fashioned by influential men who’re as susceptible to the country’s lies as any of their most gullible marks. Anderson’s political parables underline the gulf existing between private and public power and between internal and external theater, dramatizing these constructs with an unmooring empathy that enlightens a universal loneliness. Chuck Bowen


Magnolia

9. Magnolia (1999)

On its self-pitying terms, Magnolia is a wounding, dizzying, and even profound experience—the work of a virtuoso who’s desperate to be heard yet hemmed in by self-consciousness. Anderson attempts to fashion something as momentous as the art of heroes such as Robert Altman, Raymond Carver, Martin Scorsese, and Hal Ashby, and this obsession with greatness weighs him as well as the film down. Following a few dozen citizens of San Fernando Valley over a 24-hour period, Magnolia overflows with overwritten proclamations of love, operatic tracking shots, wonderful Aimee Mann songs, diseased patriarchs, and belabored parallels between young and old characters—all capped off with a deus ex machina that’s still audaciously poignant. The film’s structure is subtle, however, as the narratives run in concentric loops, climaxing multiple times—about once every hour—and suggesting a musical album with recurring bridges and choruses. As obnoxious as Magnolia is at its low points—such as nearly every scene featuring Melora Walters as a cokehead with daddy issues—it has an adventurous vibrancy that can no longer be taken for granted in American cinema, and was created by an ultra-earnest Anderson who no longer quite exists. Bowen


Boogie Nights

8. Boogie Nights (1997)

If you were a male American filmmaker coming of age in the 1990s, chances are that you had a coke- and cock-addled crime epic percolating within you, a la Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Yet Boogie Nights remains an amazing achievement for Anderson’s affection for his characters and for his prodigious command of scale and tone. Following a family of porn filmmakers in the late ’70s, as the purity of their trade is threatened by the emergence of VHS, Anderson laces ’90s-era crime-film clichés with rapt longing. Rising porn star Dirk Diggler’s (Mark Wahlberg) need to prove himself is indistinguishable from Anderson’s own fragile precocity, and, whenever you feel that you’ve got the filmmaker pegged, he pivots. A tasteless subplot featuring real-life porn star Nina Hartley (who has superb comic timing) has a shocking climax, and the film grows hopeful just when it appears determined to plunge itself into hell. As livewire as Anderson’s staging is, his kinship with his actors is more impressive. Wahlberg has never been more urgent, and Burt Reynolds is accorded the iconic treatment he deserves, giving a performance of autumnal majesty. Julianne Moore is stripped of her actorly defenses, and dozens of other repertory players hit notes of wounded and exhilarating grace. Anderson tries to be a bad boy but settles, thank God, for being a humanist. Bowen

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Hard Eight

7. Hard Eight (1996)

Anderson’s first feature film, written and directed when he was 24, could reasonably inspire envy in veteran journeymen. The filmmaker’s control over his medium is astonishing, as there isn’t a superfluous line of dialogue or a wasted gesture or camera movement. The theme is the same as that of nearly every Anderson film, following a makeshift family that’s assembled around a commanding and mysterious personality, and which is imperiled when something floats up from the patriarch’s past. Anderson masterfully weaves two nesting love stories—between a surrogate father and son and between a drifter and a waitress—as danger gradually pushes an old con man to confess to his affection for his protégé. Fittingly, given the vulnerability of the men involved, Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) opens up to John (John C. Reilly) over the phone, where they both feel somewhat safe. Yet this physical distance is heartbreaking, and establishes a motif that still governs Anderson’s cinema: of men who need love so badly they push it away. Bowen


There Will Be Blood

6. There Will Be Blood (2007)

Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Daniel Plainview, a California oil tycoon in the early 20th century, is remarkable on a primal level, but like Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in Inherent Vice, it’s more than a little self-aware. Day-Lewis is more surprising in Phantom Thread, a richer film that’s nonetheless unimaginable without There Will Be Blood’s experimentation in austerity, as particularly embodied by Jonny Greenwood’s jangly score, which exacerbates the film’s curdled American-western atmospherics. Certain sequences are among Anderson’s finest, such as the existentially jittery explosion of an oil rig and a haunting, fleeting image of Daniel feeding liquor to a baby whom he adopts as a surrogate son (played by Dillon Freasier as a child and Russell Harvard as an adult). But the film’s theme is ultimately pat, connecting the rise of the oil business with the ascension of organized church as representing the simultaneous birth of modern America’s power and hypocritical piousness. The violent ending provides a catharsis that releases the audience from There Will Be Blood’s disenchanted spell—the sort of escape that Anderson has since refused to provide in his work. Bowen


Punch-Drunk Love

5. Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

With Punch-Drunk Love, characters began to talk less in Anderson’s cinema, the musicality of dialogue emphasized via sharp punctuations of silence. Emotions are often channeled in the film through explosions of color that contrast with the sterile spaces of shopping centers and drab cracker-box apartments. When characters express themselves directly in Punch-Drunk Love, especially the ones played by Adam Sandler and Emily Watson, their confessions feel hard-earned—indicative of broken people struggling to experience connectivity with a degree of dignity. Anderson’s camera correspondingly calms down, using negative space to complement and exacerbate the tension of silence and repression. Another source of tension is the stunt casting of Sandler as a romantically inept oddball who’s emotionally castrated by sisters who’re presented by Anderson—in a gesture that over-telegraphs his hand—with scalding contempt. The film refines the mother obsession of Boogie Nights, which has evolved throughout Anderson’s career. In Punch-Drunk Love, a broad dichotomy exists between diseased matriarchal figures and soul-nourishing mates. Bowen


Inherent Vice

4. Inherent Vice (2014)

The ‘70-set Los Angeles of Anderson’s Inherent Vice toes a fine line between fantasy and reality, between the L.A. of many noirs and the one pockmarked by hopelessness, poverty, racism, and alienation. Despite the film’s finely honed sense of casualness, Anderson has a lot on his plate here, as he’s competing with multiple legends: Thomas Pynchon, who wrote the source novel; Robert Altman, who directed the seminal counterculture noir, The Long Goodbye; and Stanley Kubrick, whose chilly, specific, yet modernist approach to period settings is a clear and under-acknowledged influence on Anderson’s work. Reverence inevitably bogs Anderson down, and Joaquin Phoenix, as a heartbroken, perpetually stoned private eye, essentially doing a one-man routine off in the figurative corner of the room. Yet, Anderson viscerally captures Pynchon’s notion of a past that never existed—a viscous illusion that pollutes the sensibility of a counterculture that’s scattered among the streets, undiscernible from the advertisements and graffiti. The supporting cast is flawless, the erotically despairing atmosphere is terrifying and hilarious, and a brilliant sex scene centers on a woman who wields power by feigning powerlessness, which is conjured from her own very real past of violation. Bowen

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Licorice Pizza

3. Licorice Pizza (2021)

Following on the heels of a handful of films orchestrated in stately legato, Paul Thomas Anderson’s eighth feature is a rollicking picaresque that chugs along in hurtling tracking shots and montages scored to contemporaneous radio hits. But the air of carefree playfulness doesn’t fully amount to rose-colored nostalgia, as Anderson sprinkles enough hints of danger, inequity, and societal breakdown throughout to lend his autobiographical jam session a sneaky depth of feeling. On the surface, Licorice Pizza may be Anderson’s most uncomplicatedly romantic film, as it presents a pair of searching souls who seem made for each other and proceeds to tear away the perceived barriers between them over the course of two spectacularly entertaining hours. But its subtle recognition of a thornier reality on the margins of Gary (Cooper Hoffman) and Alana’s (Alana Haim) charmed path spikes the crowd-pleasing payoff with a dash of arsenic. As in Phantom Thread, love is shown to be an escape from reality, a regression to a youthful state of innocence that temporarily conceals the more challenging parts of ourselves—and in this film, of society itself. Lund


Phantom Thread

2. Phantom Thread (2017)

Like The Master, Phantom Thread conveys an exhilarating sense of completion—of Anderson having found and fully honed the personal poetry for which he was clearly searching in Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood. Descriptions of shot selections, line readings, and musical cues cannot convey the elusive, primordial power of The Master and Phantom Thread, which exude a masculine urge to bear something of the soul. The protagonists of these films are burdened with bitterness and neuroses that they cannot define, looking to other men and women to inform their un-channeled emotional energy with purpose. In Phantom Thread, Anderson suggests that there’s a way out for the fashion designer, Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), as he finds a companion in manipulation, Alma (Vicky Krieps), who can play him as well as he’s played most other conquests, including muses and patrons alike. Inherent Vice ended on a similar note of qualified hope, and so these films cumulatively suggest that The Master’s sense of damnation is reversible. This rediscovered optimism may signal Anderson’s awareness of his own artistic coming of age. Bowen


The Master

1. The Master (2012)

Not long after meeting WWII veteran Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a drifter and alcoholic who’s suffering from what’s now called PTSD, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) invites the troubled man to his daughter’s wedding, proclaiming that “your memories aren’t invited.” If Anderson’s cinema could be reduced to a single line of dialogue, these four words might be most fitting, alluding to the past that looms over every Anderson protagonist and implicitly referencing the limitations of the American idea of reinvention.

In The Master, Anderson conveys a sense of apartness from society that’s almost unparalleled in American cinema. Tracking shots, once so ostentatious in Anderson’s cinema, sveltely glide over miniature communities that beckon to Freddie from a distance, such as the party first engulfing Lancaster’s boat, which is lit up among the night, glittering with a lonely poetry that’s worthy of the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald. More evocative yet is a long shot in a department store where Freddie briefly works as a photographer, as he watches a woman model a dress, strolling the aisles to entice customers into buying her garment.

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Freddie and this woman are joined by emotional entrapment, by a sense that they’re to serve and witness the American dream of actualization while never knowing it. This disappointment is a homegrown product of the fantasies engulfing this country, which are expressed and deflated in every Anderson film, as characters search for success and family as ways of sorting out their place. Freddie, the ultimate Anderson protagonist—played by Phoenix with an iconic mixture of control, spontaneity, and seriocomic fearlessness—is that thing which America pretends to celebrate: the nonconformist. Following Freddie beyond the brink of total estrangement, breaking his film down into hallucinatory fragments, Anderson faces his most galvanizing nightmare: of discovering that one’s true place is no place. Bowen

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