Best of 2000s

A powerful and gargantuan tale of colossal greed that bursts off the screen with rabid savagery.

Paul Thomas Anderson has created a larger than life myth and triumph of filmmaking technique. A near master work I feel is in the same league as CITIZEN KANE, and THE GODFATHER PART II.

Watching Daniel Day-Lewis in this is like viewing some dangerous wild animal violently rampage. Within the first 10 minutes where his character toils in a mine and absolutely no dialogue is spoken, we get a notion of how profoundly terrifying his character is. He embodies all of the cold and bleak aspects of the effects of manifest destiny. L.I.E.'s Paul Dano also gives an awesome demanding performance as the twin brothers Eli and Paul Sunday.

The craft of THERE WILL BE BLOOD is so bravura aesthetically that it once again points out that Paul Thomas Anderson (the director of MAGNOLIA, my favorite film of 1999) is obviously one of America's most maverick auteurs.

Those expecting P.T. Anderson's trademark undertones of Christian humanism exhibited in all of his prior films (HARD EIGHT, BOOGIE NIGHTS, and PUNCH DRUNK LOVE) will be quite startled by this film's lack of redemption and how faithful it is to Upton Sinclair's harsh view of humanity.

One of the most iconic and amazing sequences ever committed to celluloid in recent years is a moment where this oil tower erupts into an almost biblical scale inferno and cinematographer Robert Elswit captures it with assured majesty. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood composes one of the most ominous and sweeping film scores in recent memory.

I know this may be an overly ambitious statement to make, but I don't believe there has been this dense a character study in American cinema since Scorsese's RAGING BULL (1980).

From start to horrifying finish, THERE WILL BE BLOOOD will haunt you for quite some time.

Like Robert Bresson, or Roberto Rossellini, the Dardenne brothers have some serious theological undertones to their cinema and they don't try to hide the influence of their faith on their work. Don't let the christian stuff turn you off though, being very aware of the negative connotations that can come along with it. You won't find any traces of disgusting fundamentalism or obnoxious evangelical showmanship. No, the Dardenne's films exhibit a spirituality born of genuine compassion and redemption. Their objective hand-held camera work gives L'ENFANT the gritty realism of a documentary, to me, a documentary about what true humanism is at its very core.



The main character is a sinner and thief who has made up his mind to sell his newborn son on the black market, and then I don't want to give away too much, but the film then takes a path through a series of emotionally painful events that eventually beat the concept of real salvation into the viewer's mind.



Like Hirokazu Kore-Eda's NOBODY KNOWS in 2004, I found this picture to be so emotionally devastating at times that it was almost physically painful to watch. However, for me, the agonizing sadness a very empathetic viewer endures during the film is just rewarded by the overwhelming catharsis at the end. So transcendentally spiritual it has put an everlasting effect on me after viewing, and it just makes the sappiness of Hollywood endings even more obvious, if they weren't already. It's a miracle how profoundly deep art can move a person, and this film is very much a miracle of modern cinema to me.