There Will Be Blood: Critic Reviews

For bleakness, the movie can't be beat -- nor for brilliance.

There Will Be Blood Paul Thomas Anderson's epic American nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell.

This is a film by Paul Thomas Anderson that has overshot the runway of movie modernity with something thrillingly, dangerously new.

There Will Be Blood is a bold and sprawling epic about false prophets and massive profits set in a stark and dramatic oil-rich landscape.

Paul Thomas Anderson becomes California's certified cinematic poet laureate with There Will Be Blood.

There Will Be Blood is anti-state of the art. It's the work of an analog filmmaker railing against an increasingly digitized world. In that sense, the movie is idiosyncratic, too: vintage visionary stuff. It's physical and tactile.

This is truly a work of symphonic aspirations and masterful execution.

Blood does not release its grip on the audience until its last, bizarrely crazy minutes.

What's so remarkable about this film is not its time frame but the wealth of its detail, t he eloquence of its images, and the sweep of its ambition

As an incurable romantic, I hold out hope that Anderson's flawed but phenomenal feat here marks the start of a new, mature stage in a long career. He has genius in him. So does the movie -- before its ending.

A haunting enigma that refuses to conform to any recognizable pattern, period or otherwise. I suppose you could see it as a descendent of Citizen Kane. But such comparisons aren't really fair to either film.

If [Day-Lewis] does not win the Academy Award for this protean portrayal, it will be because he's won before. Or because his gift, his discipline, is so daunting it can be confounding.

It's sublime -- beautiful and ghastly at once.

As astounding in its emotional force and as haunting and mysterious as anything seen in American movies in recent years.

A force beyond categories.

There Will Be Blood reminds us that the greatest screen performances don't settle for capturing one trait, a dominant emotion or an easy way in.

Lively as bombastic period storytelling but limited as allegory.

Day-Lewis, channeling John Huston and Orson Welles (the grumbling intonations, the crazy-eyed glares) and who-knows-who-else, is nothing short of astounding.

A work of stunning intelligence and dramatic sweep, a portrait of a young nation struggling to find itself, torn between religious and business values.

A maddening epic with a towering, bravura performance from star Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood will rattle your brain for weeks, even months after you see it.

There Will Be Blood is a masterpiece; Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as a ruthless oilman is without flaw.

An impressive achievement in its confident expertness in rendering the simulated realities of a bygone time and place, largely with an inspired use of regional amateur actors and extras with all the right moves and sounds.

Boldly and magnificently strange, There Will Be Blood marks a significant departure in the work of Paul Thomas Anderson.

The best movie performance so far this century? No contest. There's Daniel Day-Lewis' awe-inspiring turn as a greedy oilman in There Will Be Blood, and there is everyone else.

It's oil, and a West that was just discovering it, that makes There Will Be Blood intriguing. But it's Day-Lewis who draws us in.