Quartile rating: 8/10 · 3 ratings
Ruthless silver miner, turned oil prospector, Daniel Plainview, moves to oil-rich California. Using his son to project a trustworthy, family-man image, Plainview cons local landowners into selling him their valuable properties for a pittance. However, local preacher Eli Sunday suspects Plainview's motives and intentions, starting a slow-burning feud that threatens both their lives.
There Will Be Blood is a towering American epic with near-universal acclaim. Daniel Day-Lewis delivers one of cinema's all-time great performances as Daniel Plainview — ferocious, magnetic, and utterly singular. Paul Dano matches him with unsettling intensity. PTA's direction and Robert Elswit's cinematography are stunning, capturing the vast, desolate California landscape with operatic grandeur. The film's conception — a Upton Sinclair adaptation reimagined as a character study of capitalism and religious fanaticism — is profoundly distinctive, earning top Novelty. The ending is iconic and viscerally memorable ('I'm finished!'), but its abrupt, almost theatrical absurdism divides audiences and slightly undermines the film's otherwise sustained tension, keeping it from a full 4.