Extra so than with different administrators, it’s at all times tempting to overly psychologize Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies, in search of traces of his private improvement and hints of autobiography: the daddy figures of “Magnolia” or “The Grasp,” the partnership of “Phantom Thread,” parenthood within the new “One Battle After One other.” But two issues really set his work aside. There’s the extremely excessive degree of craft in every of them, giving every a singular really feel, sensibility and visible id, and in addition the deeply felt humanism: a pure love of individuals, for all their faults and foibles.
Anderson is an 11-time Academy Award nominee with out ever having received, a scenario that might rectify itself quickly sufficient, and it speaks to the extraordinarily excessive bar set by his filmography that one may simply reverse the next checklist and nonetheless find yourself with a reputable, if maybe extra idiosyncratic rating. Reorder the movies nonetheless you want — they’re all, nonetheless, on the very least, extraordinarily good. Merely put, there’s nobody doing it like him.
Maybe nothing marks Anderson as a filmmaker from the ’90s as a lot as his impeccable use of music, from the drowned-in-sound deluge of “Boogie Nights” to his ongoing collaboration with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood as a composer. So simply so as to add to the arguability of the next checklist, we’ve additionally famous a favourite tune or two from every film, the tune titles usually turning into shock summations of the plots themselves.
This checklist is made in good religion, with none purposeful stuntery (sincere). Be happy to tell us how your opinions range.
