There Will Be Blood, 11/9.

"The film is an overwhelming, intense experience, as [Paul Thomas] Anderson's pictures often are, but with one key difference," blogs Ryan Gilbey for the Guardian. "His 1996 debut, Hard Eight (aka Sydney) was a sinewy thriller overly indebted to David Mamet. Boogie Nights and Magnolia seemed artificially pumped-up, dependent on gargantuan structures that the writing itself wasn't mature enough to justify, while Punch Drunk Love, (the most mysterious and magical of his films before now) felt like an experiment that could spiral out of control at any moment. But There Will Be Blood represents the moment at which Anderson's material and his sense of scale are in perfect harmony: it needs to be this vast, this long."

Updated through 11/13.

For Jeffrey Wells, this "is one of those legendary, go-for-broke, fiercely psychological big-canvas art movies that you need to see twice - the first time to go 'whoa!' and recoil and get all shaken up and bothered about, and the second time so you can reconsider and see what a masterwork it is, despite your feelings about the malignant emotional content," writes . "If you're a film maven of any kind you can't let your piddly emotions get in the way of recognizing diseased greatness." Via Anne Thompson, who comments: "He nails it."

Like Wells, Michael Guillén caught the film in San Francisco: "By internet buzz alone the benefit screening of There Will Be Blood packed the Castro Theatre. You have to understand, this is a big theatre.... As for the film, I can't say much more than has already been shouted from the rooftops. It's a stately, elegant piece of work... Anderson's film, however, is much too long and unnecessarily obscure at key points."

Earlier: Reviews from Fantastic Fest.

Update, 11/12: "This film will beat you down, bury you under its weight. But your beating will be beautiful," writes Ryland Walker Knight at the House Next Door. "It should come as no surprise that the final credit on screen in There Will Be Blood is a dedication to Anderson's mentor and one-time boss, Robert Altman, for it is a film that could not have been made were it not for McCabe & Mrs. Miller, or 3 Women; nor without Days of Heaven, nor The Shining, nor, especially, Anderson's own Punch-Drunk Love. Yet it is a distinctive work. As much as it inherits from its antecedents, it bears Anderson's signature throughout."

Update, 11/13: "[U]tterly superb," writes David Ehrenstein. "Paul Dano is the real breakout here. We expect DDL to be terrific but I would never have suspected the very promising young man from Little Miss Sunshine had a performance like this in him."

Posted by dwhudson at November 9, 2007 2:50 PM