Every Paul Thomas Anderson movie, ranked from worst to best

Where do Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, and the new Licorice Pizza land in a full assessment of this great director’s work?

By A.A. Dowd  |  November 25, 2021 | 6:00am
Film Lists Paul Thomas Anderson
Every Paul Thomas Anderson movie, ranked from worst to best
Punch-Drunk Love (Screenshot); Licorice Pizza (Photo: MGM); Boogie Nights (Screenshot); Phantom Thread (Screenshot); The Master (Screenshot)

This weekend brings one of the biggest events of any cinephile’s year: a new movie from Paul Thomas Anderson. Licorice Pizza, the writer-director’s ’70s-set comedy of puppy-love infatuation, is already earning glowing reviews from the critics, though it will be another few weeks before most of the country can dip into this digressive, meandering portrait of the San Fernando Valley of its maker’s youth. That the movie is earning raves should, of course, be no real surprise to anyone who’s been following Anderson’s career since he burst into the international movie-lover’s eye in the mid-’90s. Pretty much every one of Anderson’s features is, to one degree or another, cherished. He’s the rare filmmaker of any nationality or generation who seems to inspire something relatively close to consensus admiration each time at bat.

Where fans will naturally disagree is on the matter of preference within that filmography. You could poll 10 different Anderson aficionados and probably get 10 different opinions on what qualifies as his best and worst (though, actually, you’d probably see some general agreement on the worst). All of which is to say, the ranking that follows is really nothing more than one writer’s opinion; were even one other critic to contribute to it, the results might be radically different. Truthfully, all of Anderson’s movies are worthwhile–even his doodle of a hour-long music documentary, Junun, which we’ve decided to exclude from the hierarchy. Hell, even this critic might disagree with his own rankings on a different day. That’s the nature of assessing an artist as consistently rewarding as PT Anderson: He makes the very concept of a “favorite” an opinion in perpetual progress, as slippery as the psychologies of his characters.

9. Hard Eight
9. Hard Eight
Punch-Drunk Love

This weekend brings one of the biggest events of any cinephile’s year: a new movie from Paul Thomas Anderson. , the writer-director’s ’70s-set comedy of puppy-love infatuation, is already from the critics, though it will be another few weeks before most of the country can dip into this digressive, meandering portrait of the San Fernando Valley of its maker’s youth. That the movie is earning raves should, of course, be no real surprise to anyone who’s been following Anderson’s career since he burst into the international movie-lover’s eye in the mid-’90s. Pretty much every one of Anderson’s features is, to one degree or another, cherished. He’s the rare filmmaker of any nationality or generation who seems to inspire something relatively close to consensus admiration each time at bat.Where fans will naturally disagree is on the matter of preference within that filmography. You could poll 10 different Anderson aficionados and probably get 10 different opinions on what qualifies as his best and worst (though, actually, you’d probably see some general agreement on the worst). All of which is to say, the ranking that follows is really nothing more than one writer’s opinion; were even one other critic to contribute to it, the results might be radically different. Truthfully, all of Anderson’s movies are worthwhile–even his doodle of a hour-long music documentary, , which we’ve decided to exclude from the hierarchy. Hell, even this critic might disagree with his own rankings on a different day. That’s the nature of assessing an artist as consistently rewarding as PT Anderson: He makes the very concept of a “favorite” an opinion in perpetual progress, as slippery as the psychologies of his characters.

9.

Every great artist has to start somewhere. And like that , Paul arguably got his worst movie out of the way first. Hard Eight, about a seasoned underworld lifer (Philip Baker Hall) and the shiftless hustler (John C. Reilly) he takes under his wing, is very much a first feature—the working definition of a promising debut, a modest character study of gambling-world archetypes that shows early flashes of talent but little of the supreme formal command Anderson would soon develop. There’s something to be said about knowing your limitations and adhering to them; in terms of scope and budget, Hard Eight never bites off more than it can chew. Today, it’s most fascinating for how it anticipates where Anderson’s filmography would go, kicking off several of his fruitful onscreen collaborations (yes, that’s a young Philip Seymour Hoffman as a cocky craps player), establishing the influence of Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme on his style, and offering an inaugural, surrogate father-son relationship in a career full of them.

8.

Here’s where we’ll surely lose some of you. Ask plenty of Anderson diehards (including one who ), and they’ll tell you that his sprawling ensemble drama about the entwined lives of distraught, stuck-in-the-past Angelenos is an earnest career highlight. The film certainly has its soap-operatic grace notes, and Anderson wrings a few great performances out of his giant ensemble, including a superb turn from Tom Cruise as a ladykiller guru whose misogynistic pickup-artist gospel is really just an echo of his unresolved daddy issues. Yet never before or since has Anderson strained so strenuously (and so obviously) to deliver a capital “M” masterpiece: Magnolia is three hours of exhausting, self-indulgent crescendo, like six melodramatic movies packed into one, and its pretensions outpace its achievements. Still, in the end, you do have to admire how boldly it risks ridicule in pursuit of transcendence, with big swings like the Hail Mary amphibian shower of the last act and a non-diegetic Aimee Mann sing-along that only a filmmaker high on his own burgeoning audacity and acclaim would dare orchestrate.

7.

Anderson’s latest might be his shaggiest: a rambling, ambling Valley comedy that uses the will-they, won’t-they relationship between a strutting teenage actor (Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Philip Seymour) and his twentysomething crush (Alana Haim, of the rock band Haim) as license to just riff on a time capsule’s worth of glowing Nixon-era milestones and memories. It’s easy to see why the film has been rapturously received: It marries Anderson’s gift for eliciting sharp performances and staging memorable set pieces to an uncommonly warm nostalgia. If it’s not quite love at first sight for The A.V. Club, that’s probably because Licorice Pizza sometimes threatens to lose sight of its central relationship in a borderline-plotless rush of incident, including a few uncharacteristically bum comic notes (like a misguided recurring bit involving John Michael Higgins doing an outrageous Japanese accent that might count as the worst two scenes of Anderson’s career). Still, PTA movies tend to improve with age, and something tells us this one might grow on us, too; it certainly isn’t lacking for stuff to admire, like Haim’s radiantly prickly lead performance and an extended screwball detour involving a cameoing Bradley Cooper and an out-of-gas delivery van.

6.

Speaking of movies improving with age, Anderson’s other discursive zigzag through the San Fernando Valley of the early ’70s gets better with every viewing—in part, certainly, because it becomes easier to follow its convoluted (and arguably incidental) Thomas Pynchon plot. The only true adaptation of the filmmaker’s career—There Will Be Blood doesn’t really count—Inherent Vice mostly stays faithful to its byzantine source material, charting an episodic course through the web of corruption untangled by perpetually stoned private detective “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix). What lingers isn’t the particulars of the mystery or the conspiracy, but the way Anderson uses them to chronicle the death of one era at the hands of another, as the oppressive forces of American culture came down hard on the counterculture dream of a better country and the ’60s bled nightmarishly into what followed. When fascist LAPD frenemy “Bigfoot” (Josh Brolin) wolfs down a whole bowl of Doc’s weed, it’s at once hilarious and strangely moving—a voracious attempt at consuming but also maybe understanding the values of the other side.

5.

Situated chronologically between the showboating, three-hour extraness of Magnolia and the towering Kubrickian severity of There Will Be Blood, Anderson’s off-kilter variation on the prototypical Adam Sandler vehicle can’t help but look like a transitional, palate-cleansing “minor work” in a career full of major ones. Yet on its own deliberately scaled-down terms, it’s a bittersweet miracle: a misfit romantic comedy that oscillates between passages of funny, jangly stress and bursts of pastel-hued, besotted bliss. Anderson’s grand experiment is to unearth the melancholy buried within Sander’s shtick—to wonder aloud how sad and frustrating life might actually be for one of his signature man-children. The writer-director was the first to coax something more meaningful out of the SNL player; in the soulful introversion of Barry Egan, one can see the first seeds of a real talent that would eventually blossom further for Noah Baumbach and the Safdie brothers. Punch-Drunk Love, then, might be the pinnacle of Anderson’s ambition to identify a performer’s true essence and build a whole thrilling platform to showcase it.

4.

Anderson scored his first Best Picture nomination for this staggeringly constructed portrait of American obsession and greed, loosely pulled from the pages of Upton Sinclair’s nonfiction Oil! The awards attention makes sense: It’s the most plainly grand and weighty of his films, an epic 20th-century period piece with shades of Kubrick and Malick, Giant and Citizen Kane. Yet to focus exclusively on the big themes of There Will Be Blood is to deny the hidden reservoirs of eccentric personality the filmmaker digs up, just like the oil uncovered by grubby, furious baron Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis, who won a deserved Oscar for his megalomaniacal effort). Which is to say, this is an idiosyncratic epic that refuses to view its competing tyrants of ego and ambition as merely symbols; they’re fascinating, offbeat characters, too. And they collide in what may be the most iconic scene Anderson has yet offered: a deliriously deranged and spiteful final battle for the soul of our country, waged by the forces of capitalism and religion, which Anderson reveals to be two power-hungry sides of the same coin. How many Great American Movies are this darkly funny, this madly quotable, this… drinkable?

3.

Maturity is overrated. While Anderson has made more creatively adventurous and thoughtful and singular movies in the years since, he’s never quite matched the sheer joy of his breakout second feature, the film that announced him as a blazing new visionary of American excess, an heir apparent to the throne of Martin Scorsese and a kindred spirit to rock-’n’-roll sensation junkie Quentin Tarantino. Yet Boogie Nights, despite its fabulously rendered porn-world milieu and nonstop-bacchanal structure (buoyed by a mixtape of peerless needle drops), is about more than just pleasure. In the rise and fall of teenage stud Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg, who should really stop apologizing for the movie that made him a movie star), Anderson paints a whole mural of lost innocence—the way the anything-goes reverie and revelry of the 1970s was poisoned by the mercenary money-grubbing of the decade after. His best joke: that these merchants of smut are really quite wholesome, a big family of wide-eyed dreamers. It’s enough to make you sympathetic to those who wish Anderson would cool it with the chilly genius and just get his groove on again.

2.

The moment when Paul Thomas Anderson truly became himself, largely shedding the remaining vestiges of his devotion to beloved ancestors (the borrowed gestures of Scorsese and Altman and Demme) and charting a wild, bewitching, confounding new course of his own design. The Master, which essentially begins with a Rorschach test, retains its mysteries and ambiguities after countless viewings; one can see all manner of meanings in the complex, symbiotic bond it forges between a damaged, amorous war veteran (Joaquin Phoenix, in what might be the most grippingly volatile performance of the new millennium) and the L. Ron Hubbard-like spiritual huckster (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who adopts him like a child, or a dog, or the true-believer muscle his abusive cult-cum-religion needs to survive. Visually, it’s a generous feast of wonders, shot on a 70mm format that Anderson unusually deploys to study the close-up canvas of human features. Conceptually, it’s even richer—his most satisfyingly unresolved meshing of oddball character study and searching national portrait. The title, naturally, can be interpreted a few ways. Intentionally or not, it describes the artist who made it, too, finally and fully hatching from an embryonic state of skilled imitation.

1.

A controversial choice, perhaps. Can the most refined, buttoned-up film of this director’s esteemed career really be his best? Shouldn’t his finest contain at least one glorious FM soundtrack cut, one “pig fuck!” exclamation, one virtuosic, Steadicam inferno? Yet as multiple, enriching revisits reveal, Phantom Thread’s haute-couture classiness is a smokescreen for the most profound and ultimately rather perverse relationship the director has ever put onscreen. Like dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis again, in his fittingly final performance before retiring from the presumably exhausting Method grind), Anderson sews secret messages and ideas into the immaculate embroidery of his work. In its own deceptively reserved way, this is as funny and as emotionally tumultuous a movie as Anderson’s ever made; it simply dresses its eccentricities up with steady, unparalleled, downright classical aesthetic control, a far cry from the flashier stylistic moves of his heyday. In the end, Phantom Thread feels achingly personal, perhaps even a self-portrait from an artist whose own obsessive, possibly alienating drive to create might not be so far from the creative impulses of the House Of Woodcock. Don’t think it’s his masterpiece? That’s okay—this writer . But time does endless favors to a movie this timeless in its craft and insights.

 
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