ポール・トーマス・アンダーソンのエピックシネマへのガイド

With 11 Academy Award nominations, three Golden Globe wins and a historic sweep of prizes at Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals, Paul Thomas Anderson boasts a career that most filmmakers only dream of. Landing his first feature deal for Hard Eight at just 24, the San Fernando Valley native has since gone on to deliver one mind-addling, gut-wrenching, soul-searching masterpiece after another.

Veering wildly in tone and subject matter, staring down the barrel of Anderson’s filmography can be daunting for the uninitiated. The good news is that his small but mighty output consists of far more hits than misses. Whether it’s a slow-burn character study of an L Ron Hubbard-esque cult leader (The Master) or an effervescent coming-of-age screwball comedy (Licorice Pizza), his films are anchored by an extraordinary empathy for human frailty. What emerges are cerebral, labyrinthine and downright inventive cinematic experiences that burrow deep into our psyches long after the lights go up.  

While Anderson’s early entries wore their influences openly – Robert Altman’s overlapping storytelling with a dash of Martin Scorsese’s kinetic bravado – he now clearly operates on his own plane. Fuelled by unbridled audacity and relentless ambition, the 55-year-old’s trademark loose camerawork, indulgent tracking shots and painstaking compositions affirm him as one of America’s greatest living filmmakers.

As Anderson’s latest, One Battle After Another, arrives in UK cinemas, AnOther recommends six highlights from the Angeleno’s genre-hopping oeuvre.

In an article for The New York Times, Anderson once recalled growing up in the Valley surrounded by “houses and trees and … porno shoots”. It seems only fitting that his breakthrough film pays homage to exactly that. Oozing with bacchanalian style and high-voltage needle drops, Boogie Nights tracks “17-year-old piece of gold” Dirk Diggler on his extravagant rise and fall in the late-1970s porn industry. A dual portrait of decadence and decay, Anderson unleashes games of Russian roulette, mountains of cocaine and a spectacular dick reveal – inviting us not just to enjoy the high but to grapple with the messy comedown that follows. A box-office hit, the film earned him his first Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay. If, as Diggler insists, “everyone’s blessed with one special thing”, then Anderson’s would be his knack for capturing brutality without ever losing sight of humanity (or at least by filtering it through heart-shaped sunglasses).

Handed final cut for his third film by New Line Cinema, Anderson crafts a sprawling tapestry of nine interlocking lives – from abusive dads to estranged sons and drug-addicted daughters – each struggling to come to terms with their difficult pasts. Dialled up to a biblical intensity, Magnolia unfolds as a gripping study of loneliness, forgiveness and the lifelong pursuit of happiness. Running over three hours and featuring a behemoth ensemble cast including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore and Tom Cruise at full tilt (“Respect the cock and tame the cunt!”), this is Anderson’s most grandiose – and perhaps most divisive – film to date.

Often overlooked as a breather between Anderson’s two hurtling epics, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, Punch-Drunk Love is a skittish, slapdash jaunt through the troubled mind of small-business owner Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) as he finds himself in the throes of an unexpected romance. Spurred by the fantastical notion that love can, in fact, save us, we watch him go from smashing a bathroom stall mid-date to proclaiming with wide-eyed conviction that, “I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine.” Channelling Anderson’s atypically low-key register, cinematographer Robert Elswit bathes each frame in gorgeous streams of light that dissolve into kaleidoscopic bursts of colour. Saccharine without a trace of satire, this oddity of a film gets everything right about love – absurd, potent and impossible to miss, like a harmonium falling from the sky.

Anderson’s magnum opus is an exercise in terror, opening with a menacing tremolo that gives way to the visceral image of Daniel Day-Lewis furiously hacking away underground with a pickaxe. Based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood pivots on a seismic showdown between maniacal oil tycoon Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis, in his second Academy Award-winning role) and zealous young preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). As the title prophesies, it descends into a quintessentially American dream-turned-nightmare, a vision of hell shrouded in Jonny Greenwood’s droning, atonal score. The film exposes a distinctly 20th-century brand of sociopathy that insists we be content not only with destroying ourselves, but also each other, and the world with us. In Plainview’s words: “If you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw … now my straw reaches across the room and starts to drink your milkshake. I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!”

“These were perilous times, astrologically speaking, for dopers.” So goes a warning that wafts among the hazy entanglements and slippery personalities of Anderson’s iridescent neo-noir, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a perpetually zonked private detective plying his trade at the fag-end of the hippie movement. Anderson serves up Inherent Vice like a bong hit, relishing in pure sensorial texture in lieu of any conventional narrative structure. As plot and protagonist become increasingly discombobulated, we learn to give in to its warped, woozy rhythms (helped along by Can’s ultra-addictive Vitamin C blasting through the title card). The trick? Don’t think, just inhale. By no means Anderson’s best, the film still acts as a useful entry point to Pynchon’s notoriously inscrutable work and hints at what we can possibly expect from One Battle After Another.  

Poisonous mushrooms, wretched curses and ghosts of mothers past are just a few of the strange and surreal ingredients that make up the visual feast that is Phantom Thread. Drawing on the likes of Cristóbal Balenciaga and Charles James, the film follows obsessive couturier Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis, in what was intended to be his swan song) as he comes undone at the hands of his enigmatic muse Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps, in her Hollywood debut). Anderson’s first effort as cinematographer lends a tickling, conspiratorial intimacy, his lens gliding up and down curved wooden staircases and lingering on deep purple velvets and shiny pink silks. But it’s Greenwood’s billowing strings-and-piano score – awash with angst and desire – that weaves us through this tightly spooled world. The film may present as another ego-steeped parable of toxic masculinity, but hidden in the seams is a quiet rebellion, a testament to our heroine’s unflappable nerves and indomitable spirit (“I have to love him in my own way”). Seductive and restrained, it’s unlike anything Anderson has done before.

One Battle After Another is out in UK cinemas now. 

With 11 Academy Award nominations, three Golden Globe wins and a historic sweep of prizes at Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals, Paul Thomas Anderson boasts a career that most filmmakers only dream of. Landing his first feature deal for Hard Eight at just 24, the San Fernando Valley native has since gone on to deliver one mind-addling, gut-wrenching, soul-searching masterpiece after another.

Veering wildly in tone and subject matter, staring down the barrel of Anderson’s filmography can be daunting for the uninitiated. The good news is that his small but mighty output consists of far more hits than misses. Whether it’s a slow-burn character study of an L Ron Hubbard-esque cult leader (The Master) or an effervescent coming-of-age screwball comedy (Licorice Pizza), his films are anchored by an extraordinary empathy for human frailty. What emerges are cerebral, labyrinthine and downright inventive cinematic experiences that burrow deep into our psyches long after the lights go up.  

While Anderson’s early entries wore their influences openly – Robert Altman’s overlapping storytelling with a dash of Martin Scorsese’s kinetic bravado – he now clearly operates on his own plane. Fuelled by unbridled audacity and relentless ambition, the 55-year-old’s trademark loose camerawork, indulgent tracking shots and painstaking compositions affirm him as one of America’s greatest living filmmakers.

As Anderson’s latest, One Battle After Another, arrives in UK cinemas, AnOther recommends six highlights from the Angeleno’s genre-hopping oeuvre.

In an article for The New York Times, Anderson once recalled growing up in the Valley surrounded by “houses and trees and … porno shoots”. It seems only fitting that his breakthrough film pays homage to exactly that. Oozing with bacchanalian style and high-voltage needle drops, Boogie Nights tracks “17-year-old piece of gold” Dirk Diggler on his extravagant rise and fall in the late-1970s porn industry. A dual portrait of decadence and decay, Anderson unleashes games of Russian roulette, mountains of cocaine and a spectacular dick reveal – inviting us not just to enjoy the high but to grapple with the messy comedown that follows. A box-office hit, the film earned him his first Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay. If, as Diggler insists, “everyone’s blessed with one special thing”, then Anderson’s would be his knack for capturing brutality without ever losing sight of humanity (or at least by filtering it through heart-shaped sunglasses).

Handed final cut for his third film by New Line Cinema, Anderson crafts a sprawling tapestry of nine interlocking lives – from abusive dads to estranged sons and drug-addicted daughters – each struggling to come to terms with their difficult pasts. Dialled up to a biblical intensity, Magnolia unfolds as a gripping study of loneliness, forgiveness and the lifelong pursuit of happiness. Running over three hours and featuring a behemoth ensemble cast including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore and Tom Cruise at full tilt (“Respect the cock and tame the cunt!”), this is Anderson’s most grandiose – and perhaps most divisive – film to date.

Often overlooked as a breather between Anderson’s two hurtling epics, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, Punch-Drunk Love is a skittish, slapdash jaunt through the troubled mind of small-business owner Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) as he finds himself in the throes of an unexpected romance. Spurred by the fantastical notion that love can, in fact, save us, we watch him go from smashing a bathroom stall mid-date to proclaiming with wide-eyed conviction that, “I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine.” Channelling Anderson’s atypically low-key register, cinematographer Robert Elswit bathes each frame in gorgeous streams of light that dissolve into kaleidoscopic bursts of colour. Saccharine without a trace of satire, this oddity of a film gets everything right about love – absurd, potent and impossible to miss, like a harmonium falling from the sky.

Anderson’s magnum opus is an exercise in terror, opening with a menacing tremolo that gives way to the visceral image of Daniel Day-Lewis furiously hacking away underground with a pickaxe. Based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood pivots on a seismic showdown between maniacal oil tycoon Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis, in his second Academy Award-winning role) and zealous young preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). As the title prophesies, it descends into a quintessentially American dream-turned-nightmare, a vision of hell shrouded in Jonny Greenwood’s droning, atonal score. The film exposes a distinctly 20th-century brand of sociopathy that insists we be content not only with destroying ourselves, but also each other, and the world with us. In Plainview’s words: “If you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw … now my straw reaches across the room and starts to drink your milkshake. I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!”

“These were perilous times, astrologically speaking, for dopers.” So goes a warning that wafts among the hazy entanglements and slippery personalities of Anderson’s iridescent neo-noir, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a perpetually zonked private detective plying his trade at the fag-end of the hippie movement. Anderson serves up Inherent Vice like a bong hit, relishing in pure sensorial texture in lieu of any conventional narrative structure. As plot and protagonist become increasingly discombobulated, we learn to give in to its warped, woozy rhythms (helped along by Can’s ultra-addictive Vitamin C blasting through the title card). The trick? Don’t think, just inhale. By no means Anderson’s best, the film still acts as a useful entry point to Pynchon’s notoriously inscrutable work and hints at what we can possibly expect from One Battle After Another.  

Poisonous mushrooms, wretched curses and ghosts of mothers past are just a few of the strange and surreal ingredients that make up the visual feast that is Phantom Thread. Drawing on the likes of Cristóbal Balenciaga and Charles James, the film follows obsessive couturier Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis, in what was intended to be his swan song) as he comes undone at the hands of his enigmatic muse Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps, in her Hollywood debut). Anderson’s first effort as cinematographer lends a tickling, conspiratorial intimacy, his lens gliding up and down curved wooden staircases and lingering on deep purple velvets and shiny pink silks. But it’s Greenwood’s billowing strings-and-piano score – awash with angst and desire – that weaves us through this tightly spooled world. The film may present as another ego-steeped parable of toxic masculinity, but hidden in the seams is a quiet rebellion, a testament to our heroine’s unflappable nerves and indomitable spirit (“I have to love him in my own way”). Seductive and restrained, it’s unlike anything Anderson has done before.

One Battle After Another is out in UK cinemas now.