There Will Be Blood

The past few months have hardly lacked for audacious exercises in cine-hubris — The Assassination of Jesse James, Southland Tales and I'm Not There, to name three excellent examples — but, as bizarre as it often is, There Will Be Blood is the one that packs the strongest movie-movie wallop. This is truly a work of symphonic aspirations and masterful execution. Anderson's superb filmmaking is complemented throughout by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood's excellent score — at once modernist and rhapsodic, full of discordant excitements, outer-space siren trills and the rumble of distant thunder.

There's hardly a dull moment. Digs collapse, gushers burst into flame, God metes out punishment and so does man. Revelations overturn the narrative: The last 20 minutes are as shocking in their way as the plague that rains from the sky in Magnolia's finale. By the time the closing words "There Will Be Blood" appear (with a burst of Brahms) inscribed in heavy gothic letters on the screen, Anderson's movie has come to seem an Old Testament story of cosmic comeuppance and filicidal madness — American history glimpsed through the smoke and fire that the lightning left behind.