There Will Be Blood, 12/10.

There Will Be Blood "is as astounding in its emotional force and as haunting and mysterious as anything seen in American movies in recent years," declares David Denby in the New Yorker. "I'm not quite sure how it happened, but after making Magnolia (1999) and Punch-Drunk Love (2002) - skillful but whimsical movies, with many whims that went nowhere - the young writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has now done work that bears comparison to the greatest achievements of Griffith and Ford. The movie is a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, but Anderson has taken Sinclair's bluff, genial oilman and turned him into a demonic character who bears more than a passing resemblance to Melville's Ahab.... As for Daniel Day-Lewis, his performance makes one think of Laurence Olivier at his most physically and spiritually audacious."

Updated through 12/16.

"There are great films (like No Country For Old Men) and then there are films that send shock waves through the very landscape of cinema, that instantly stake a claim on a place in the canon," blogs Scott Foundas, promising more on the film in the LA Weekly in the coming weeks. "Often, such vanguard works fail to be fully understood or appreciated at the moment they first appear, as some of the initial reviews that greeted Psycho, 2001 and Bonnie and Clyde attest. There Will Be Blood belongs in their company, and I consider myself fortunate to belong to a group with the foresight to recognize it in its own moment."

Earlier: the 12/5 and 11/9 entries and reviews from Fantastic Fest. And Lynn Hirschberg's profile of Day-Lewis for the New York Times Magazine.

Updates, 12/11: "Both Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd and Paul Thomas Anderson's (yes) masterpiece There Will Be Blood are built around protagonists who harbor an unquestionable disdain for their fellow man," notes Filmbrain. "These are no lightweight run-of-the-mill haters, but rather echt misanthropes that would make Vonnegut, Kafka or Jean-Paul Sartre proud. For Sweeney Todd and Daniel Plainview, hell truly is other people."

David Carr nabs quotes from the New York premiere.

Updates, 12/12: "In this moviegoing year of unrestrained morbidity and malfeasance, There Will Be Blood fits in very nicely with all the prevailing paranoia on and off the screen," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

"Another film-school-in-a-box by Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood is a triumph of vivid, overly assertive aesthetic minutiae - crammed to its oil-slicked rafters with highly stylized forms of art direction, cinematography, performance, dialogue, and music," writes Ed Gonzalez. "All that's missing from it is a sense of humanity."

His fellow Slant reviewer disagrees. Nick Schager on the first 15 or 20 minutes: "Never before has the writer-director's hand seemed so assured and attuned to the rhythms of his material, his gorgeously poised compositions and elegant narrative-advancing edits not only clearly setting up the themes (religion, family, deceit, self-interest) that will come to dominate his tale, but also conveying a formidable level of technical expertise and slowly building volcanic tension. Such authorial command doesn't waver once Daniel and those around him begin speaking."

Updates, 12/13: "Minute for minute, There Will Be Blood still thrills more than anything else I've seen this year, and that's even more true for the second viewing," blogs Jürgen Fauth, who's got a couple of pix from a press conference.

"There Will Be Blood has all the trappings of a conventional, albeit inspired, period epic," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "The production design by Jack Fisk, who's worked on all of Terrence Malick's films, is meticulously and beautifully detailed. Robert Elswit's widescreen cinematography often has an epic sweep. Certain scenes, such as the out-of-control gushing of an oil well that Plainview sees (correctly) as his vindication have a vigor and a pull that recalls the big-scale classicism of Lean. But There Will Be Blood is, in fact, not a historical saga; rather, it's an absurdist, blackly comic horror film with a very idiosyncratic satanic figure at its core."

Updates, 12/15: "[T]here's no doubt in my mind that Anderson has made the defining movie of 2007 - a year, after all, when the world may have passed peak oil production and continues to shed rivers of blood over who controls it," writes Jürgen Fauth. "There Will Be Blood opens as an epic history with a sprawling canvas and a keen eye on vivid period detail, but its fearless gaze keenly zeroes in on the final tunnel vision, a merciless conclusion so appalling that it threatens to curdle your very bodily fluids."

Sample Jonny Greenwood's soundtrack at Modern Fabulosity.

Updates, 12/16: Blood is a "shock to the system," writes Michael Atkinson, "an adaptation of Upton Sinclair that sheds everything I've always felt self-infatuated and annoying about Anderson's films (never-say-when sophomoricism, pointless epic-ness, aimless traveling shots, excessive quirk), and comes at the turn-of-the-century oil-prospecting morality tale with a stunning sense of grandeur (every image has an iconic feel), a bewitching respect for actors and viewers (you'll find no other recent American film so full of multi-character set-piece shots), a disorienting soundtrack that keeps you on the balls of your feet (by Jonny Greenwood), and Daniel Day-Lewis, making good on the small but entertaining bet he lost, via caricature and cheese, in Gangs of New York. Also, this is a film of uneasy textures and elisions; like Punch-Drunk Love, what we witness sometimes seems to evoke things we didn't, and the filmmaker has no interest in spelling things out for us, but instead lets us stew and grapple with the mysteries of history. The best new American film of the year, and in the nick of time."

"[T]he cast looks as though they walked out of late nineteenth century photographs, not merely giving There Will Be Blood the distinction of feeling like a exquisite period piece, but sealing this world into an epochal part of America's past while echoing strains of our present state of progress," writes Jenny Jediny at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Occasionally it feels as if little has altered, that greed is no less overpowering today than it was nearly a century ago, and that little separates church and state; rather they remain intertwined in what feels like malignant co-dependency. There Will Be Blood is as frightening as it is engrossing; with a single viewing I felt a bit shell-shocked, if giddy, while the second was far easier to absorb, and to take note of the smaller details that remain in my mind like a well-written novel."

Posted by dwhudson at December 10, 2007 3:34 PM