Paul Thomas Anderson’s 10 Movies, Ranked From Worst to Best

Anderson’s most recent love letter to the San Fernando Valley is his most effervescently nostalgic, brimming with authentic period detail, several standout set pieces and youthful misadventure (PTA’s “worst” would be many directors’ proud best). The film follows 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Anderson’s late friend and close collaborator Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a precocious child-actor-turned-hustler, and 25-year-old Alana Kane (rockstar Alana Haim), an aimless photographer’s assistant, as they forge an unlikely bond while romping through 1970s Los Angeles, flirting between buddyhood and irrepressible romance.

Anderson had the kernel of the film’s screwball premise for years — “What happens when an eighth grader asks a grown woman out on a date and she actually turns up?” — and did his level best to imagine a kid of the ’70s who’s precocious enough to make the answer to that question more dramatically interesting than anyone might reasonably expect. There’s much to delight in throughout the film — Haim’s revelatory screen debut, Bradley Cooper’s show-stopping appearance as Jon Peters incarnate and the intoxicating sense of period and place — but critics have been divided on whether the film’s episodic structure adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

It’s also a kind of homecoming for Anderson — a return, yet again, to the Valley that raised him and to the loose rhythms of his early work, filtered through the formal precision of his later films. But this is the one PTA title where we’d probably be more inclined to revisit favorite moments on YouTube than to surrender to the whole thing in a single sitting. 

Nearly impossible to see these days outside a PTA retrospective, Anderson’s debut is striking, given his later career, for its lack of ambition. This Reno-set neo-noir is surprisingly low-key and clearly indebted, like every American indie movie of the mid-’90s, to Quentin Tarantino (it even includes a Samuel L. Jackson cameo).

But beneath the crime-movie tropes — run-down motels, a kidnapping gone wrong, the waitress/hooker with a heart of gold — lies a very Paul Thomas Anderson tale of friendship and surrogate family, focused on the connection between a low-stakes gambler (Philip Baker Hall) and John (John C. Reilly), a lost young man trying to find enough money to bury his mother.

Anderson famously fought with producers Rysher Entertainment, who recut the film (originally titled Sydney) before its Sundance premiere. He and his cast raised $200,000 to restore the director’s cut, which premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard — a bruising fight that set the tone for a career Anderson would wage entirely on his own terms.

Anderson’s first Thomas Pynchon adaptation is far more faithful to the source material than One Battle After Another is to Vineland, delivering a film about a stoner that leaves the audience feeling stoned.

The ridiculous, deliberately incomprehensible plot involves so many intertwining conspiracies — a heroin addict’s missing husband, a shady real-estate deal, a cult and a drug-smuggling ring called the Golden Fang — that we end up as befuddled as Joaquin Phoenix’s shaggy-haired, self-medicating private eye, Larry “Doc” Sportello, stumbling through the fog of 1970s L.A. (and that of late-stage capitalism) wondering how we got here.

The meandering pointlessness that turned off many on release is, in fact, the point. A rewatch confirms Inherent Vice as one of Anderson’s sweetest and most nostalgic films — a faded postcard haunted by the promise of an America that has drifted away like pot smoke from a bogarted joint.

Anderson has regularly described this feature as his personal favorite of all his films — and who are we to quibble with the master? Contrary to expectations at the time of its release, The Master is a deeply poetic dual-character study rather than anything like a straightforward exposé of Scientology. Anderson was initially inspired by John Steinbeck’s memoir writings about a dissolute drifter on the California coast — the genesis of Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd — a thinly veiled L. Ron Hubbard figure — reportedly came into the picture later to give the story shape, and to allow Anderson to explore his damaged WWII veteran’s search for meaning, a signal feature of mid-century California, in all its pain and promise.

Mihai Malaimare Jr.’s 65mm cinematography is suffused with epic clarity. From the roiling wake of a ship at sea to the intimate close-ups of Freddie’s weathered, anguished face, every frame feels either grand or sculpted. Structurally, it’s one of Anderson’s most abstract works — elliptical, unmoored and dreamlike. 

Most memorably, though, the movie functions as a showcase of the dueling acting styles of its two brilliant, fully committed stars: Phoenix’s febrile animal instinct and Hoffman’s craft and titanic emotional command. Their inexplicable bond — even need for one another — is as magnetic and weirdly plausible as it is unlikely. Amy Adams’ potent performance as Dodd’s steely wife and behind-the-scenes operator, Peggy Dodd, is its own revelation. What on first watch may have seemed off-putting and baffling about the film becomes hypnotic, even lovable, on repeat viewings. This one is a vibe.

With There Will Be Blood, Anderson crafted an uncompromising American epic of greed, faith and black gold that many regard as his masterpiece. Daniel Day-Lewis portrays turn-of-the-century oilman Daniel Plainview as the embodiment of ruthless proto-capitalist drive, with the film unfolding like a western frontier saga that gradually descends into psychological horror. Formally, it finds Anderson adopting the language of fresh cinematic idols with his usual peerless flair. The film announces its ambition from its wordless opening — nearly 15 minutes of pure image and sound, following Plainview’s heroic toil in the desert — a bravura act of visual storytelling that recalls Malick at his most elemental. The slow-burn psychological creep and symmetrical compositions that follow are unmistakably Kubrickian, abetted by Jonny Greenwood’s jagged, atonal score — alternately primal and transcendent.

Day-Lewis’ operatic intensity, meanwhile, won him his second Oscar for best actor, minted memes (“I’ll drink your milkshake!”) and secured Daniel Plainview’s craggy mien a permanent place on the Mount Rushmore of great American antiheroes. (Lore from the film’s production is appropriately mythic, too: Anderson’s crew famously built a 60-foot wooden oil derrick in West Texas and set it ablaze for the apocalyptic gusher sequence. The resulting smoke cloud reportedly grew so enormous it drifted onto the nearby set of the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, forcing them to pause shooting.)

The battle of wills between Plainview and Paul Dano’s preacher, Eli Sunday, anchors the film’s thematic richness — American capitalism versus frontier religion in a death grip, each as corrupt as the other. But the film doesn’t take sides so much as show how both men use power and charisma to dominate, whether in business or a congregation (although the bowling alley finale offers a rather clear hint as to which force Anderson believes ultimately “wins” in the corrupt early American contest of wills). Fans continue to hail Day-Lewis’ performance as a career culmination and Anderson’s storytelling as essential Americana. (And yes, we’re aware many will be out for blood over where this one lands on our list.)

After the sprawling, emotional symphony of Magnolia (“all this cancer and crying,” as he once put it), Anderson has said he set out to make “a real entertainment movie” for his third feature — something “contained and uplifting.” The PTA version of that, it turns out, is Punch-Drunk Love, a 95-minute swirl of deadpan humor, disorienting anxiety and genuine sweetness that miraculously reimagines Adam Sandler and the rom-com through the lens of abstract art. The film’s strange heart is rooted in a real news story, which Anderson secured the rights to: a man who amassed over 1 million frequent-flyer miles by buying $3,000 worth of pudding during a poorly conceived promotional offer.

Sandler plays Barry Egan, a socially stunted novelty-toilet-plunger salesman with seven bullying sisters and an explosive temper. His life is an anxious loop of yearning and embarrassment until a quasi-mystical harmonium mysteriously appears at his door — and then, just as improbably, an opportunity for love in the form of the gentle, luminous Lena (Emily Watson). Their oddball romance is beautifully stylized through splashes of color by visual artist Jeremy Blake and the warm lens flares of cinematographer Robert Elswit, both taking Anderson’s cue that he wanted emotion in the film to function like its own special effect. Other unforgettable formal qualities include Jon Brion’s deliriously eccentric score, built partly from ambient warehouse noises, its percussive, chaotic rhythms immersing the audience in Barry’s headspace.

Anderson has said he wanted to make “an arthouse Adam Sandler movie” to see what would happen if you took the comedian’s man-child innocence and bottled rage seriously. Sandler’s range has blossomed in the years since — see the Safdie Bros.’ Uncut Gems or Noah Baumbach’s upcoming Jay Kelly — making it easy to forget just how visionary and outlandish this casting initially seemed back in 2002, when Sandler’s most recent hit was The Waterboy. But if Punch-Drunk Love has an intoxicating essence, it’s the wonder and possibility of new love — which may also have some biographical basis in the PTA timeline. Anderson has said he was in the midst of falling for Maya Rudolph — the mother of his four kids and partner of 24 years — while making this movie. As Sandler declares in the film’s final act, during his climactic showdown with Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing one of his cult-favorite characters: “I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine. I would say that’s that, Mattress Man.”

After the success of Boogie Nights, Anderson got carte blanche to make his magnum opus: A three-hour-plus operatic ensemble film that remains his most ambitious work to date.

Magnolia is nine barely connected stories of pain and loneliness loosely joined by a selection of Aimee Mann songs that closes with a biblical deluge of frogs. It is operatic and over the top in nearly every scene, from Tom Cruise’s “tame the pussy” presentation as a pre-manosphere misogynistic motivational speaker (if only we had been paying attention) to Julianne Moore’s screaming pharmacy meltdown.

That Anderson makes it all work is close to miraculous, moving seamlessly from parody to pathos, from John C. Reilly narrating a nonexistent cop show straight to camera to Philip Baker Hall as a dying game show host who has spent a career performing the congenial father figure but has abused and abandoned his own daughter.

Taking several pages from his cinematic mentor, Robert Altman — the loosely intertwined stories of Short Cuts, Nashville‘s overlapping dialogue and immersive sound design, the behind-the-scenes satire and Steadicam cinematography of The Player — Anderson constructs, out of the throwaway lives of bit players in the entertainment industry in his beloved San Fernando Valley, an operatic parable of damaged children who keep passing on their pain until they finally realize that judgment is coming and we all better wise up.

Phantom Thread, appropriately enough, is arguably Anderson’s most elegant and controlled film — a sumptuous period romance that doubles as a sly psychological thriller, or a couture love story with a little packet of poison sewn into the seams. Anderson has said the premise came to him when he was bedridden with an illness and realized how much he enjoyed his wife doting on him, inspiring the vision of a master craftsman who can only express vulnerability when brought into a state of total dependency. Set in the 1950s world of London high fashion, the film stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Reynolds Woodcock, a fastidious couture designer, and Vicky Krieps as Alma, the young waitress who upends his carefully ordered world.

In trademark fashion, DDL worked closely with PTA to create Woodcock from whole cloth, spending a full year studying dressmaking — to the point that he was able to stitch a vintage Balenciaga gown from scratch before shooting began. Notably, the film was also the great actor’s first performance in years without massive facial hair (see: There Will Be Blood, Lincoln and Gangs of New York), letting audiences remember just how dashingly handsome he can be when the method allows. The movie’s craft is immaculate throughout — from the Oscar-winning period costumes to the smudged beauty of PTA’s 35mm cinematography, the luxuriant lushness of Jonny Greenwood’s score and the hilarious one-liners delivered by Woodcock with dry, lethal precision — all rewarding repeat viewings.

The film can be seen as a darkly comic examination of marriage and its negotiations of power, or as a feminist subversion of the “great man” archetype, with Alma quietly refusing her place as another disposable muse. Either way, it’s most of all an irresistible love story. When Reynolds eats the poisoned omelet to submit to Alma’s control in the film’s final act — whispering with ardor, “Kiss me, my girl, before I’m sick” — toxic co-dependency has never felt so wonderfully romantic.

Anderson’s adaptation of Pynchon’s Vineland jettisons most of the novel’s 1970s-set story of burned-out radicals adrift in Reagan’s America to capture the chaos of our current moment, caught somewhere between anxiety and outrage, resistance and despair. The result is a $130 million action epic that, as Warner Bros. touts it, could be “the defining film of a generation.”

Leonardo DiCaprio gives a career-high performance as former radical Bob Ferguson, now a burnt-out, daytime-bathrobe-wearing dad hiding off-grid with his teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti, in a star-making turn), who’s pulled back into the fight when his old nemesis, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (a spectacularly tight-assed Sean Penn), returns with a vengeance. Every performance crackles — Benicio del Toro, as the dojo-owning sensei who runs a migrant underground railroad in a sanctuary city, is a standout — and Anderson, always a set-piece master, shifts into overdrive with a nonstop series of action sequences, including one of the finest car chases ever committed to celluloid.

It’s The Big Lebowski meets Mad Max: Fury Road by way of The Battle of Algiers. But One Battle After Another remains unmistakably PTA: from its all-American obsessions with race, violence and velocity, to its focus on the families we’re born into and the ones we build. And the film’s humane, unsentimental coda reminding us we may never win the battle for a better world — but we have to keep fighting. (Read THR’s review of One Battle After Another.)

This rags-to-raunchy-riches tale of a dishwasher with 13 inches of raw talent chasing his seedy version of the American Dream shows a director — just 27 years old at the time (!) — in total control.

It’s not just the anamorphic lensing, the infinitely quotable script, the opening Steadicam shot (a tip of the hat to Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Robert Altman’s The Player) or the succession of perfect needle drops. It’s the deep empathy Anderson shows his group of horny misfits, all searching for connection in the San Fernando Valley’s adult film industry of the 1970s and ’80s.

His prosthetic-assisted turn as porn autodidact Dirk Diggler transformed Mark Wahlberg, white rapper and underwear model, into Mark Wahlberg, movie star. Burt Reynolds may have loathed his role as idealist erotic entrepreneur Jack Horner, but Boogie Nights gave him a late-career revival, a Golden Globe and his one and only Oscar nomination.

Anderson would go bigger and dig deeper into his obsessions — surrogate families, American myth-making, the commodification of art, the eternal struggle for control — in later films. But everything that makes a Paul Thomas Anderson movie great is already here, in his breakout sophomore feature, packed in like a stuffed sock in Y-fronts. “It’s a real film, Jack.”