Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson • 1999 • United States
Starring Tom Cruise, Melinda Dillon, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Altmanesque portrait of a day in the crisscrossing lives of various San Fernando Valley residents—including a sleazy pickup artist (Tom Cruise); a distraught, pill-popping, soon-to-be widow (Julianne Moore); a has-been former quiz-kid phenom turned sad sack (William H. Macy); a lovelorn cop (John C. Reilly); and a troubled, coke-addicted young woman (Melora Walters)—is a gloriously sprawling, dizzyingly ambitious roulette wheel of chance encounters, freak occurrences, and emotional extremes. Virtuoso tracking shots, the music of Aimee Mann, and a climax of biblical proportions come together in a mosaic of human pain and catharsis that confirmed Anderson as one of contemporary American cinema’s most audacious auteurs.
Up Next in Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
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There Will Be Blood
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson • 2007 • United States
Starring Daniel Day Lewis, Paul Dano, Kevin J. O’ConnorAn electrifying performance from Daniel Day-Lewis animates this sprawling epic of family, faith, power, and oil—the rare twenty-first-century film to have already ascended to the leve...
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Punch-Drunk Love
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson • 2002 • United States
Starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour HoffmanChaos lurks in every corner of this giddily off-kilter foray into romantic comedy by Paul Thomas Anderson. Struggling to cope with his erratic temper, novelty-toilet-plunger sales...
