THERE WILL BE BLOOD

A strange and enthralling evocation of frontier capitalism and Manifest Destiny set at the dawn of the 20th century, THERE WILL BE BLOOD recounts the tale of a ferociously successful wildcat oil driller with the allegorical handle Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis). Alive only through sheer force of will after surviving a mining accident, we meet this nearly destroyed man as he writhes through the muck and mire. But he harnesses the thing that almost killed him—extracting raw profit from the very earth—and he builds an empire out of it. Woe to the man–or man of God–who gets in his way.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 instant classic signaled a sea change in what was already a fascinating career. The flashy, modern swagger of his earlier pictures is replaced with a formal detachment and fascination with pinpointing what exactly went wrong with 20th century America, or if anything was even good to begin with.

“There’s hardly a dull moment. Digs collapse, gushers burst into flame, God metes out punishment and so does man. Revelations overturn the narrative. By the time the closing words ‘There Will Be Blood’ appear (with a burst of Brahms) inscribed in heavy gothic letters on the screen, Anderson’s movie has come to seem an Old Testament story of cosmic comeuppance and filicidal madness—American history glimpsed through the smoke and fire that the lightning left behind.” - J. Hoberman