Where to begin with Paul Thomas Anderson

In modern American cinema, Paul Thomas Anderson is a unicorn: a filmmaker who, having directed his first feature nearly 30 years ago, has all the way into the IP-fixated 2020s continued to command mid-sized budgets for original, adult-targeted drama about people. Anderson has spent most of his career following complex characters across a changing America — more specifically California — from fledgling oil towns at the beginning of the last century to sprawling urban centres today, along the way taking in 1950s cults, counterculture conspiracies and, in his latest film, One Battle After Another (made on his biggest budget so far), post-Recession race relations and revolt. No capes, no CG fantasylands; Anderson’s films almost always concern America and Americans, but they would seem antithetical to Hollywood studio cinema in 2025, such is their persistent weight and maturity.

And yet there is light and magic to Anderson’s films. Absurd comedy can be found even in his most serious pieces, and the director’s sometime credit, ‘PT’ Anderson, like Barnum, hints at an element of the fantastic in his work. Anderson’s world often looks like the real one, but there are also encounters and happenings there so unlikely, and so seismic, that the only explanation could be a kind of cosmic fate.

The first chapter chronologically in Anderson’s great American story might also be the director’s masterpiece. Tracking prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) through three decades, from silver mining in New Mexico to oil divination in California, There Will Be Blood (2007) has a drive and intensity to match its single-minded protagonist’s own. It’s a film about nothing less than the sins of the father, Plainview’s relationship with son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) as troubled as any parent-child relationship in Anderson’s work, and a battle at the foundation of modern America between commerce and religion (the latter represented by vainglorious preacher Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano).

Such hefty subject matter warrants bold approaches to the material: a score of shrieking horror strings by regular PTA composer Jonny Greenwood; cinematography by six-time Anderson DP Robert Elswit which renders human faces as impressive as desert vistas; and a molecular central performance so singular and so great in terms of both skill and size it’s the film’s greatest spectacle. Gimlet-eyed and honey-voiced, Day-Lewis introduces Plainview as a figure of American gentility and entrepreneurial spirit, and then gradually lets that mask slip, the oil man’s roaring villainy increasingly exposed (and permitted) as his wealth and power grow.

Before the grand themes and patient, widescreen style of There Will Be Blood brought Kubrick comparisons, Anderson was likened to another great American filmmaker. There’s some of Scorsese and De Palma in the pace and technical virtuosity of Anderson’s early work, but the kind of everyday USA that Anderson depicts there — dimly lit bars, half-empty diners — and in particular the young director’s knack for ensemble drama had him frequently pegged as an heir to Robert Altman.

Following his modest debut — Hard Eight (1996), a low-key tale of smalltime casino hustlers that could be a lost New Hollywood crime drama – Anderson rapidly grew in confidence to deliver perhaps his most purely entertaining film, Boogie Nights (1997), and maybe his most ambitious in Magnolia (1999). Both follow multiple characters inside and on the periphery of LA’s entertainment industry, a recurring interest for the Studio City-born Anderson; in Boogie Nights, it’s California’s porn scene from disco to the Reagan 80s, and in Magnolia it’s a quiz show around which dozens of characters chaotically orbit.

While Boogie Nights approaches the world of adult cinema as Goodfellas (1990) does New York mobsters, racing through a years-long rise-and-fall narrative with a constant bed of pop on the soundtrack, Magnolia is a three-hour dramatic odyssey set over a single day. Anderson’s style has since become looser, but in these early pictures the director is exact, exerting supreme control over the rhythm and flow of his many intersecting storylines, and making space for delineation of and compassion for each and every character — good Samaritans, addicts, abusers and all.

There’s no shortage in Anderson’s films of lonely souls looking for meaning and connection, but none are more adrift than The Master’s (2012) Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), an alcoholic WWII veteran who gravitates towards cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Fluid, luminously photographed and with a Greenwood score that alternates between dreamy and distressed, the film plays as if in a dream state (or one of Dodd’s spurious hypnosis sessions). If it’s something of a love story, with Dodd not just surrogate family for Freddie but perhaps his soulmate, then it’s often a terribly sad one, its protagonist left so raw — almost bestial — by war and booze that he may be incurably damaged. There’s added poignancy in that the film marks the end of Anderson’s five-picture run with the late Hoffman, remarkable here as the imperious, Wellesian ringmaster to Phoenix’s ferocious carnival act.

Though he favours character-driven drama in a realist mode, Anderson has on occasion dabbled in genre. Anderson’s version of a romcom, Punch-Drunk Love (2002) takes star Adam Sandler’s manchild persona — a mix of sweet immaturity and volcanic rage — and places it at the heart of an existential comedy with magical realist flourishes. Sandler’s Barry Egan is another of Anderson’s angry men, not always capable of containing violent urges, but he’s also the closest Anderson has to a romantic hero, Barry’s swooning relationship with Emily Watson’s Lena the greatest proof that, in Anderson’s world at least, love is in the stars.

Not quite a romcom, Anderson’s 1950s haute couture gothic Phantom Thread (2017) is a (somewhat twisted) romance with a generous dash of black comedy. Day-Lewis reunites with Anderson to give the director a quieter but no less finely drawn performance, as a tightly wound London fashion house panjandrum romancing an increasingly frustrated younger muse played by Vicky Krieps. In Anderson’s films, love can ache, but in Phantom Thread the romantic discord is a source of much wicked humour.

A dual coming-of-age story, Licorice Pizza (2021) finds Anderson largely foregoing his usual intense character investigation for something lighter: an episodic year in the lives of 15-year-old jobbing actor-cum-entrepreneur Gary (Cooper Hoffman) and his 28-year-old crush Alana (Alana Haim). The most freewheeling of Anderson’s films, Licorice Pizza is an evocation of a place and time — LA’s San Fernando Valley, 1973, with all its long-since-outmoded sexual and racial attitudes — and the heady aimlessness of adolescence (actual for Gary, arrested for Alana).

In Inherent Vice (2014), perma-baked PI Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) investigates the mother of all LA conspiracies as the sun goes down on the Free Love era. Anderson’s (and indeed anyone’s) first crack at adapting Thomas Pynchon for the screen prior to the Vineland-inspired One Battle After Another, Inherent Vice is all at once zany, melancholic, laidback and supremely paranoid, a big red string-covered board of a movie connecting Nazis, land developers, drug-powered dentists and heartbroken ex-lovers. It’s not for newcomers; the film contains galaxy-brained pleasures, but it’s a noir so dense with myth and mysteries you might still be untangling it long after you’ve become an Anderson convert.

One Battle After Another is in cinemas from 26 September.