Punch-Drunk Love

This beautiful indie flick from art house maestro Paul Thomas Anderson is a deliberately understated study of neurosis and first love. Light and playful in the most part, but with an undercurrent of ire directed at societal complacency, it is perhaps most notable for an excellent performance from Adam Sandler, certainly a diamond in the turgid rough of his career.

Sandler takes the central role as Barry Egan, a frustrated, possibly mildly autistic businessman whose life is ruined by both his own repressed psyche, and the meddling of his seven ghastly sisters. Indeed, all the women that Egan encounters in the film (including the woman he speaks to on a phone-sex hotline) are a source of nothing but trauma, save for one. As his relationship with the quiet Lena, pointedly underplayed by Emily Watson, blooms, Sandler nuances his performance with a surprising amount of depth.

Combining plot elements of comedy, romance and thriller, the film is pitched as a minimalist and artistic piece. The use of colour is bold but not overpowering, and there is striking use of the late Jeremy Blake's video artwork to break up the narrative. Yet the balance is maintained, as Philip Seymour Hoffman (enjoying himself) and his goons manage to cause a believable amount of mayhem.

Anderson's screenplay and direction are typically unpredictable, and repeat viewings will undoubtedly reveal a complex substructure to the playful narrative. Despite this, Punch-Drunk Love is a pleasure to watch on a first viewing, and proof that Anderson can churn out quirky, clever little indie gems in his sleep.
4/5

There Will Be Blood

This breathtaking masterpiece from director Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the best American films in decades. Uniquely innovative from start to finish - both in Anderson's excellent script and his unorthodox direction - it also contains a career-best performance from the finest actor of his generation.

Daniel Day Lewis has had a career notable for its consistent level of excellence, no doubt due in part to his highly selective choice of roles. Here, he portrays an entrepreneur and self-proclaimed "oil-man" on his rise to wealth and power in the first decades of the twentieth century. On screen for virtually the entirety of the near-three hours of There Will Be Blood, his complete, full-blooded, human and ultimately demonic portrayal of a man's spiralling collapse within his own soul deservedly won him a second Best Actor gong at this year's Oscars.

The rest of the cast is also excellent, especially the young Paul Dano (best known as the one who doesn't speak in Little Miss Sunshine) who excels in a difficult role as a proto-evangelist preacher. Religion is a core aspect of the areas examined by the film, but Anderson does not presume to pass comment for or against it. Instead, religion and the economics of oil exploration are fused into a complex exploration of a number of issues underlying the surface fabric of the film.

Many reviews have praised the depiction of the period setting, but it isn't hard to see through this to a modern America, being chewed up by oil and religion. Both are seen as blood, coursing respectively through earth and society, a blood which boils up in the veins and arteries of the central character and is unleashed as cholic hatred on all within range.

The power and brilliance of There Will Be Blood is almost overwhelming on a first viewing - due in no small part to Johnny Greenwood's astonishing experimental score - and the film demands a second viewing. Watching it is like having your guts pulled out through your stomach, and yet somehow you leave the cinema walking on air. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
5/5

Hard Eight

This 1996 debut by rising talent Paul Thomas Anderson is an underplayed, rewarding drama about gambling and crime. Philip Baker Hall is brilliant as Sydney (the film's working title), a professional gambler who takes a young John C. Reilly under his wing after finding him penniless outside a diner. The pair go to Las Vegas, where the protégé is taught a few clever tricks to earn himself a bed for the night in a luxury casino hotel. Without warning, the films shifts forwards two years, and the pair are still working together. Reilly's character is mixed up with Samuel L. Jackson, unusually in villainous mode, and Gwyneth Paltrow is the hooker who is the object of his affections.

Pleasingly moving along an unpredictable plot at a stately pace, the film rewards in a style that Anderson would later perfect in Magnolia. Philip Baker Hall gives a magnetic performance, lending a mixture of gravitas and humanity to a role that could easily have been pantomimic. Reilly and Jackson are as excellent as ever, and Paltrow is believable as the confused prostitute whose actions catalyse the violence of the second act. There is also a small appearance by Philip Seymour Hoffman as an impertinent gambler.

Anderson is an extremely talented writer and director, both in terms of his visual style and how well he coaxes interesting performances from characters often typecast. Hard Eight is not his best picture, but it is an interesting and under-rated debut from a director who would go on to great things. For a film concerning gambling and crime, there is pleasingly little of either on show here, and instead he bravely focuses on the human drama surrounding the idiosyncratic plot.
3/5