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Already showered with awards from critics groups, There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Dillon Freasier, is opening in New York and Los Angeles today to universal acclaim. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times describes Day-Lewis's performance as "thrilling ... among the greatest I've seen, purposefully alienating and brilliantly located at the juncture between cinematic realism and theatrical spectacle." She also has high praise for the director, Paul Thomas Anderson. "It proves a breakthrough for him as a filmmaker," she writes. Overall, she concludes, the film is "a consummate work of art. ... It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post writes that Day-Lewis delivers "the best movie performance so far this century." And Anderson's direction, he adds, "reaches for comparisons with Citizen Kane and Giant and often achieves them." The combination of Anderson and Day-Lewis is "an ideal match," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. He points out however that the Upton Sinclair novel on which it is based was intended "for political purpose more than for dramatic effect so that the movie "has a weakness for the didactic." Nevertheless, he concludes, "in its willingness to push everything, even personality, to extremes, this is a film with the defects of its virtues, so it's fortunate that those virtues are very great indeed." |
