Flash of Genius

Eagle Eye

Ghost Town

The Duchess

Hounddog

Burn After Reading

Hamlet 2

The House Bunny

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Elegy

Bottle Shock

Pineapple Express

Daniel Day-Lewis delivers a blistering, destined-to-be-legendary performance as Plainview, a misanthropic wildcatter, in There Will Be Blood. Set in the late 1800s and casually adapted from Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, the new movie from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is crafted with a level of ambition, assurance and daring rarely seen in contemporary films. This brooding, odd, violent film obsessively charts Plainview's struggle to carve out a better life for himself and his adopted son and how, as his fortunes rise, his internal conflicts come roaring to the surface as he goes head-to-head with a charismatic Bible-thumping preacher (Little Miss Sunshine's Paul Dano). It's a film about many things, including the peculiarly American intersection of religious piety (when it's convenient, that is), the quest for the almighty dollar and the capacity for extreme violence. Anderson has spoken of the 1948 masterpiece The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as the film's inspiration -- Lewis even imitates the voice, cadences and mannerisms of that film's great star Walter Huston, who passed them on to his son, director John Huston. At its best, There Will Be Blood rumbles with powerful undercurrents that recall such other classics as Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Giant. It also marks a radical about-face in tone, style and scope for the prodigious creator of Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love and Magnolia, and it will spark heated debate among movie lovers while turning off moviegoers raised on ADD-style cutting, cheap emotional payoffs and tidily spelled-out themes. For others, There Will Be Blood is bold, uncompromising and extraordinary filmmaking featuring a brutally malevolent, cold, black-hearted central character. It's so uncompromisingly an art-house epic that, in our too-often bland, by-the-numbers moviemaking era, it's practically revolutionary.

by Stephen Rebello

photo credit: Francois Duhamel/©2007 Paramount Vantage, a division of Paramount Pictures and Miramax Film Corp. All Rights Reserved.