There Will Be Blood Reviews

If you want to be a movie snob this year, this is the one to say you've enjoyed. If you want to be entertained, this is the movie to avoid.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

I hate the way the film forces us into its epic structure and purposefully fractured narrative as if the audience is a puppy having its little nose shoved in a puddle of its own making.

Full Review | Original Score: B-

Who suggested the John Huston accent? We keep expecting Daniel Plainview to molest a young niece or something.

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Daniel Day-Lewis does an oil maniac in this emotionally drenched gut-slicing and grueling bipolar gore, and what is surely the most grotesque screen image ever of a warped male maternal instinct.

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There Will Be Blood has no characters who repay our working to get inside them, and it has no thoughts beyond cliches about our country.

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An excruciatingly long one-note film, filled with sickening and senseless violence, about a misanthropic oil man and an ego-filled minister.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

Individual scenes and sequences are too strange, haunting and emotionally right for the film to be dismissed. There should be no attempt or temptation to dismiss it.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

The movie looks amazing, the oil business is interesting, and the period is brilliantly captured, but the story isn't as good as all that.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Ambitious as hell but irreparably flawed, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood enthralls for half its run but balances precariously atop an epilogue that can't sustain the picture's dramatic weight.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

Day-Lewis gives a spirited performance in this too long, plotless character study. Whether it's histrionic or award-quality has to be up to the viewer.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10

And the winner of the overrated Oscar front-runner award goes to...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Crammed to its oil-slicked rafters with highly stylized forms of art direction, cinematography, performance, dialogue, and music. All that's missing from it is a sense of humanity.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

If Day-Lewis' Oscar-bound turn is one of the strongest of the year, it only calls more attention to the weaknesses around him.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

The moments that linger long after you've left the theater and forgotten how damned tedious the whole thing was are with Paul Dano's smug, moon-faced preacher

Full Review | Original Score: B-

There Will Be Blood strives for boldness, instead of just being bold. It doesn't cut, and it doesn't bleed.

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'No!' is the first word spoken in There Will Be Blood, and it should be the last said in response to Paul Thomas Anderson's latest pretend epic.

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More oil and sweat than passion and ideas course through There Will Be Blood, a film about the California petroleum boom of the early 20th century that is as anemic as it is ambitious.

Full Review | Original Score: C-

It's as if you can feel the oil flowing under the ground, bubbling, seeking a weak patch of earth from which to spew. But, the climactic emotional equivalent never occurs.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

| Original Score: 2.5/4

Challenging and far from an easy watch, even those who do respond might take a couple of viewings to fully realise just how good it is, but there's little doubt that it's a modern masterpiece.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5