For Fans of Paul Thomas Anderson

Few films since Citizen Kane have so precisely traced the pathology of American ambition. Daniel Plainview is not a villain in any simple sense: he is desire stripped of everything else, a man who has burned away sentiment so completely that when love finally arrives it destroys him. The final confrontation in the bowling alley is one of cinema's great climactic scenes, and Jonny Greenwood's score makes the whole thing feel like a religious rite. PTA was 37 when he made it.

Three hours of interlocking strangers, a frog storm borrowed from the Bible, and a Aimee Mann song turned into a group confession: Magnolia is the film that shouldn't work but does, entirely. PTA believed enough in the emotional logic of coincidence to stake his career on it, and the performances (Tom Cruise's self-help predator, Philip Baker Hall's dying game-show host, Philip Seymour Hoffman's tender nurse) reward every minute of the runtime.

After Boogie Nights and Magnolia, the expectation was another three-hour epic. Punch-Drunk Love runs 95 minutes, stars Adam Sandler, and is one of the strangest and most genuinely romantic films of its era. It treats social anxiety not as a quirk but as a real, painful condition, and uses the visual grammar of the musical to express a love story that can't be spoken aloud. The harmonium arriving at the door is still magical.

On first viewing The Master seems deliberately withholding, orbiting a friendship between Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix, barely contained) and Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) that never resolves into tidy psychology. On second and third viewings it becomes clear that the absence of resolution is the point: these are two men who cannot live with or without each other, and the film respects that ambiguity enough not to explain it. The Cause (a thinly coded Scientology) is background; the relationship is everything.