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.