Review: 'The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha' (Directors' Cuts series)

Paul Thomas Anderson's early career with such a clear and explosive style that you'd think he'd already been making films for decades. His debut, Hard Eight (aka: Sydney), was modest, but he went right from that to a sprawling epic (Boogie Nights) and an even more sprawling epic that was also ferociously outlandish and borderline supernatural (Magnolia). Everything about his filmmaking was so specific and consistent--from his rawly emotional and often juvenile dialogue to his actors' operatic performances to the details of his LA settings to his thrilling tonal shifts to his willingness to dive headlong into wild ideas--that Paul Thomas Anderson didn't seem as if he ever needed to stray from his wholly individual path.

Review: 'Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks'

No new filmmaker of the late twentieth-century reached for that brass ring like Paul Thomas Anderson. While most seemed content to ape Tarantino, Anderson made clear his aspirations to join the looming likes of Kubrick, Altman, and Malick: filmmakers of preternatural vision and ambition. Although Anderson never made any bones about his film-geek touchstones (the most reductive of critics labeled Boogie Nights his “Scorsese,” Magnolia his “Altman,” There Will Be Blood his “Kubrick,” and so on), Anderson’s films were still preciously personal and wholly original in their own rights. Each new release was an event, especially as his schedule slowed to a crawl in the twenty-first century.