Paul Thomas Anderson

Paul Thomas Anderson is the heir to the great American directors of the 1970s, and the only contemporary filmmaker who can be mentioned in the same breath as Altman, Kubrick, and Scorsese without it sounding like flattery. He has been making masterpieces since he was twenty-six years old, and he has not stopped.

Boogie Nights, his breakout, took the San Fernando Valley pornography industry of the late 1970s and turned it into an American epic — funny, sad, sprawling, and bursting with the confidence of a young director who already understood how to orchestrate a dozen characters across a decade of story without losing a single one. The long tracking shot at the pool party is the announcement of a major filmmaker. The firecracker scene is the moment he proves it.

Magnolia expanded the ensemble even further — nine interconnected stories building toward a climax so audacious (frogs falling from the sky) that it either breaks the film or transcends it, depending on your tolerance for biblical metaphor delivered without apology. There Will Be Blood narrowed the focus to a single character and in doing so created the most towering performance of the twenty-first century. Daniel Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview is a figure of such volcanic ambition and contempt that every scene he occupies feels like it might combust. The bowling alley finale is the most quotable, most disturbing ending since A Clockwork Orange.

The Master is his most elusive film — a study of the relationship between a charismatic cult leader and a damaged World War II veteran that refuses to explain itself and is all the more powerful for it. Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman circle each other like planets caught in mutual gravity, and Anderson films their interactions with a patience that lets the tension accumulate until it becomes almost physical.

Phantom Thread turned a story about a 1950s dressmaker into a psychosexual power struggle of extraordinary precision. Licorice Pizza, his most recent, is the warmest film he has ever made — a love letter to the San Fernando Valley of his childhood, shot with a looseness and joy that proved Anderson's range extends far beyond the intense dramas he is known for.

He shoots on film. He writes his own scripts. He has never made a sequel, a franchise entry, or a film based on existing intellectual property. In an era of corporate filmmaking, Paul Thomas Anderson remains stubbornly, brilliantly independent. Every film is a surprise. Every film is essential.