There Will Be Blood.

"There Will Be Blood is a chamber drama on the scale of an Old Testament allegory, an epic Western, a parable of rapacious capitalism," writes David Edelstein in New York. "It's sublime - beautiful and ghastly at once.... [Paul Thomas] Anderson's fearless, bighearted filmmaking is an antidote to the toxic cloud of Manifest Destiny. He has made a mad American classic."

"What a relief when Daniel Day-Lewis, in the final reel of There Will Be Blood, at last makes good on the title's promise," whews Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine. "Relief because for two and a half hours director P.T. Anderson sustains an atmosphere of potential threat so unremitting that even I, a dyed-in-the-wool horror enthusiast, cowered at every one of Day-Lewis's menacing sidelong glances."

Updated through 12/25.

"Call it being coy, humble, or maybe even naïve, but Messrs Anderson and Day-Lewis seem genuinely surprised by the gushing accolades and the minute analysis the film has invited," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun, where he weighs the critical response so far to the film that's still a week away from showing itself to non-credentialed audiences.

"There Will Be Blood is the sort of film you stumble out of, desperately searching, like a drowning man frantic for air, for an adjective that is both descriptive enough to encompass your experience and distinctive enough to convey your stratosphere-bound senses," writes Brandon Fibbs at cinemaattraction. "There was but a single word for me: gobsmacked."

The New York Observer's Sara Vilkomerson talks with Day-Lewis: "'Paul thought we were making a blockbuster... I thought we were making a film that would have us sort of drummed out of town with bell, book and candle...' A blockbuster? The 158-minute film is slow, detailed to the extreme and has almost no dialogue for the first 20 minutes. Mr Day-Lewis laughed heartily and shook his head. 'It's just so great Paul thought that. I just love it: There's no woman, no romance, no nothing - just fucking filthy guys digging holes in the ground.'"

The Los Angeles Times meets Anderson and Day-Lewis: "In a suite at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills to talk about the movie, which opens in Los Angeles on Dec 26, the two notoriously media-shy artists are disarmingly loose and engaging.... Anderson is unshaven and rumpled, and radiates the youthful energy of someone who is still very much in love with film." Well, that's good news.

Online listening tip. Anderson is a guest on Fresh Air.

Earlier: About a week's worth of reviews and impressions beginning on 12/10; more dated entries: 12/5 and 11/9.

Updates, 12/20: "You might expect the man behind the mask to have at least some of Plainview's fire. Or a flicker of that fixed, maniacal stare. Or at least a little bit of that thrust-out lower jaw set hard against the rest of humanity. But it's not so." Judith Lewis profiles Day-Lewis for the LA Weekly.

"It is actually not hyperbole to say Lewis creates here one of film history's greatest performances," writes Chris Barsanti at Culture Cartel. "[T]his is a film that has been directed with a skill and grace that one just doesn't honestly see anymore."

"I'll admit it - I've become obsessed with Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, easily the best film of the year," writes Filmbrain. "It's been burning inside my brain for weeks now, and I've spent countless hours dissecting Anderson's stylistic, thematic and directorial nuances, for I believe this to be that rarest of things - a perfect film. There isn't a wrong note, or single unnecessary moment, shot, or line of dialogue throughout.... I've decided to post some of these miscellaneous thoughts in the hopes of encouraging discussion."

It "very well be the best American film of the year," but Kevin Lee does have his reservations.

Updates, 12/23: "There Will Be Blood, a nerve-racking American epic written and directed by PT Anderson, is so remarkably self-assured, so fully realized - hell, it's such a flat-out masterpiece - that it's surprising to think that this Anderson, this ferocious, uncompromising genius, is the same pastiche artist who made Boogie Nights and Magnolia," writes Bryan Frazer.

In the Los Angeles Times:

• Paul Lieberman tells the lively story of the casting of Dillon Freasier as HW.

• Michael Ordaña talks with Day-Lewis.

• Reed Johnson: "The planetary and human costs of overconsumption reemerged as a major cultural theme this year, but it's an idea with deep roots in the national psyche, as evidenced by two of the year's best films: Sean Penn's Into the Wild and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood."

"Together, Messrs Anderson and Day-Lewis, two exacting auteurs doing some of their best work to date, have crafted what is at once a mesmerizing, slow-building tragedy and an effortlessly atmospheric and beautiful historical piece, redolent of sunbaked earth, oil spurts, and Plainview's bristling walrus whiskers," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "There Will Be Blood is the sort of sure-handed, well-composed movie that is rounded out with just the right detail, and you sense you're in good hands from the first shot."

"It could be argued that the two most corrupting influences on humanity today are oil companies and organized religion, and as There Will Be Blood demonstrates, 'twas ever so — or at least since the turn of the 20th century," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

Update, 12/24: "With his fifth film, There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson goes from the brainy poet of new American cinema to its deranged visionary," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "Even those of us who've always admired Anderson's work (for me, Boogie Nights was one of the best films of the 90s) never suspected he had anything like this in him. This two-and-a-half-hour saga of frontier capitalism resembles the parched Western landscape in which it takes place: a vast, craggy, forbidding expanse, rife with potential danger. It was shot in Marfa, Texas, the location of George Stevens's 1956 oil epic Giant. Elsewhere, Anderson has cited The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as his favorite film, and no portrait of an isolated, half-mad American tycoon can escape the shadow of Citizen Kane. But influences be damned: There Will Be Blood looks and, especially, sounds like no movie you've seen before."

Updates, 12/25: "Why not combine Altman's panoramic outlook with Stanley Kubrick's formal bravura with John Cassavetes's messy candor?" asks Dennis Lim in a piece for Slate on what sets PTA apart from other American filmmakers of his generation. "While Anderson fits the profile of a 'hysterical realist,' to evoke the pejorative literary buzz-phrase of a few years ago, his films never indulge in excess for the sake of excess. He's a born showman - his first three films bore the Barnumesque credit 'A PT Anderson picture' - but his go-for-broke tendencies are tied to an expansive, humanist impulse.... Anderson's detractors may be right when they complain that he can work only at a grandiose pitch. But there are worse challenges for a young director than having to find new ways to satisfy his enormous appetites - and his appetite for enormity."

"Sitting down with indieWIRE earlier this month in New York City for a one-on-one conversation about There Will Be Blood, the exceptional new film that dominated iW's 2007 film critics' poll, American auteur Paul Thomas Anderson caught a first glimpse of Upton Sinclair's re-issued 1920s novel, Oil! resting on a small table nearby," writes Eugene Hernandez. "Examining the book's cover, he groused briefly about the need to place an image of Daniel Day-Lewis on the front of the book, explaining that he had intially hoped the promotional item could be re-released with that same simple cover that first caught his eye in a London bookstore years ago. Picking up the book back in Britain started him on the long journey to making his epic new film."

"I wish There Will Be Blood had a bit more blood - not literally, but figuratively," writes Matt Singer at IFC News. "As terrific as both stars are, there is something a bit inevitable about their conflict, and as convincing as [Paul] Dano is, he's never really a true equal or rival for the power that Plainview craves and eventually wields. Their battle is a little one-sided and so the ending, however appropriate, is also bit of a foregone conclusion."

Online viewing tip. "[T]he bulk of Charlie Rose's 54 minute conversation sidesteps Paul Thomas Anderson in favor of his There Will Be Blood star," writes Ted Z. "Rose, who has interviewed Daniel Day-Lewis a couple of times, was fixated on trying to crack the shell of the tight-lipped enigma, to varying degrees of success."

Posted by dwhudson at December 19, 2007 4:02 PM