The Definitive Paul Thomas Anderson Ranking

Born in California’s San Fernando Valley (where half of his films take place) in 1970, Paul Thomas Anderson has cemented his place as one of the greatest American directors of his generation across ten films and 55 years - helming some of the most iconic and thematically rich works ever put to celluloid. Although starkly different in terms of both genre and form, all of PTA’s films center on the emotions of the human experience: how we love, learn, lie, and live. His characters all resonate with viewers for their emotional vacuums we feel compelled to both connect to and fill, from the hopeless romantics of Magnolia and Inherent Vice to the big Dreamers of Boogie Nights and Licorice Pizza. Often, a line is drawn in the five year gap between Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood, formally separating the hectic vibrancy of Anderson’s earlier years from the patient, dense drama that followed. The most painstaking aspect of trying to compare these movies is that nearly all of them are excellent in their own right; PTA has yet to make a single bad movie, let alone one that isn’t great. Although there’s no telling how many more projects Anderson will direct (and write, as he has all of his feature films), ten feels like a good place to take a breather and pit them all against each other.

While I was positive about the bookends of this ranking going in, the 8 movies in between have proved excruciating to order, and I will more than likely already have changed my mind by the time this piece gets published.

10. Hard Eight (1996)

“Never ignore a man’s courtesy.”

(★★★½ ☆)

Hard Eight, or Sydney - as Anderson preferred prior to studio meddling - is, for all intents and purposes, a pretty stellar debut. The film follows the titular Sydney (Phillip Baker Hall), a classy, seasoned gambler who takes a struggling stranger (John C. Reilly) under his wing. Eventually, the two encounter a down-on-her-luck cocktail waitress turned prostitute (Gwenyth Paltrow) and slimy security guard (the terrific Samuel L. Jackson), and the four make a cute little bunch, showing the good we get - and friends we make - out of simply being kind to those around us… right until the halfway mark. From there, Hard Eight makes every decision you are not expecting it to, morphing from a warm buddy comedy into a surprisingly tense crime thriller. Not only does Anderson’s debut introduce us to a few of the actors in his wheelhouse we eventually come to know and love, but it also introduces his clear, confident voice. The dialogue is crisp, the editing is punchy, and the camera moves with excited swagger. While Hard Eight isn’t doing anything particularly revolutionary, its characters uplift it into something truly distinguishable from its 90s crime thriller counterparts, showcasing Anderson’s most powerful strength as a writer from the get-go. These people feel real, emotionally dense, and sympathetic—so much so that the film's big twist just barely avoids being too comically shocking by the saving grace of its compelling narrative weight. Hard Eight is certainly not perfect, and its existence in the shadow of what’s to come from PTA doesn’t help its ability to be easily overlooked, but its scrappy cleverness and rich character work certainly make for some first steps worth celebrating.

9. Boogie Nights (1997)

“Do I look cool when I do it?”

(★★★★☆)

Still finding his footing but certainly not displaying any insecure compulsions to prove himself, Anderson’s second feature is a decade-spanning odyssey that explores the (if fictionalized) grimy and glamorous porn industry of the last quarter of the 20th century. But just as quickly as clarity and embarrassment cloud the mind after a particularly shameful climax, celluloid morphs into videotape, and the superstardom of a thirteen-inch saber devolves into a desperate, cocaine-nosed breadth of stories competing for some semblance of hope. This tonal shift takes us from a first half that serves as a prime example of Anderson’s dry comedy chops into a second half that reminds us he is very good at making you feel utterly miserable. Moments and scenes are introduced with these punchy inserts that add a nice flair, and you are out of “gasps” to exclaim at cool shots by the time Robert Elswit takes the camera underwater. Where Boogie Nights succeeds most, though, is its magnetic characters. There’s an incredible actor somewhere in Marky Mark that shines in this movie and pokes his head out again in The Departed, but he’s been MIA ever since. Supporting him is Julianne Moore playing a mother who just wants to feel maternal again; one of Anderson’s most quietly tragic characters in Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a boom operator who finds himself changed in a way he didn’t expect by seeing so many penises; and Burt Reynolds in a role that he adamantly regretted for the rest of his career, but one we’re all grateful for. Open to close, the film never loses steam, even if it does spread itself a little thin by the end. Boogie Nights is very funny and very, very sad, with an ending that brings both a wave of sweet relief and a relentless pit of spiritual misery. That’s porn for you.

8. Phantom Thread (2017)

“But in his work, I become perfect.”

(★★★★☆)

Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) is as stiff as his name suggests. From the first bite of breakfast, his rigorously routineized time is devoted solely to dressmaking, such that the coming and going of his continuously attention-starved muses seems to have as much effect on him as the many social invitations he brazenly declines. This changes, however, when he meets the beautiful Alma (Vicky Krieps), a waitress who might be as quick to take under his wing as all the others but not nearly as submissive to his methodized temper and unbalanced attraction. The result is PTA’s most tender film, both in its gorgeously soft cinematography and the intimate approach to this cyclically toxic relationship. The first of his films shot by himself, Anderson ditches the loud movements and vibrant palette for gentle grains and mellow colors, highlighting the wrinkles of both skin and cloth with delicate confidence. The characters and dialogue bloom with such rich care that the entire film feels fragile, a tightly bound fabric see-saw that threatens at every moment to tear at the seams. Reynolds is, by all accounts, a prickly, antisocial craftsman, but beneath that facade he lets peek a man both capable, and seemingly deserving of, love–only to retreat again when the dresses and spirit of his beloved mother speak louder than any desire to truly feel something human. Vicky Krieps goes toe-to-toe with the powerhouse that is Daniel Day-Lewis, filling the film with an emotional intensity that makes up for what it may lack in narrative propulsion. As Alma’s compulsion to love and be loved clashes with Reynolds’ devotion to his craft, the two shift between mutual admiration and an increasingly dangerous contrary—one that threatens the sanctity of both their emotional and physical well-being. By the end, Phantom Thread proves to be less a romance film than a negotiation of power; a tale as much about sincere love as it is perverse dominance—or perhaps, for Reynolds and Alma, those are synonymous.

7. Licorice Pizza (2021)

“I don’t need you to tell me whether I’m cool or not, old lady.”

(★★★★☆)

As unappetizing as the name suggests, Licorice Pizza is a warm blanket of rom-com; but the undesirability extends past just the title. The film follows high school sophomore Gary Valentine, an entrepreneur destined to prove he is very mature for his age, as he falls head over heels for Alana, a 25* year old aspiring actress who needs herself and the world around her to believe she is still young enough to dream. Certainly a pinnacle work of depiction, not endorsement, Licorice Pizza sees our love birds (for the elephant in the room’s sake, love-hatchling and love-full-grown chicken) dance a push-and-pull tango through the impossibility of their romance. A movie like this falls apart without charismatic leads, which is why, on the contrary, Licorice Pizza succeeds with flying colors. Every little moment of envy, attraction, regret, and passion resonates with such deep relatability thanks in all part to the brilliant minute choices by Cooper Hoffman (son of Phillip Seymour), Alana Haim (of HAIM), and of course the man behind the curtain Paul Thomas Anderson, the latter serving as co-cinematographer for what is easily one of his best looking projects to date (though that could really be said about all of them). Right from the first scene, we are pushed into and fully buy this friendship that teeters on—but always resists—its compulsion to become anything and everything else. Alana knows she can’t see Gary how he wishes she would, but that doesn’t stop her from becoming jealous, protective, and temptingly flirtatious at every turn. This “will they-won’t they, they definitely shouldn’t” falls against the backdrop of the 1973 oil crisis, populated by a slimily daredevilish Sean Penn (in a precursor to his incredible Steven J. Lockjaw, seen ahead), a charming mayoral candidate who has something to hide in Benny Safdie, and a rageful Bradley Cooper as real-life movie producer Tom Peters. In each scene, Anderson gets to flex both his well-tuned comedy chops and his aptitude for making you fall for inherently flawed romantics. The movie wonderfully waltzes on its dangerous edge for so long that by the time it lands on its unearned and almost misguided ending - one that seems to forget how delicate the line it's been walking truly is - it's hard not to feel a little betrayed. Still, for all its moral haziness, Licorice Pizza oozes so much heart, soul, and laughter that it’s impossible to resist; a sun-soaked, intoxicatingly uncomfortable memory of a faraway time that we know we shouldn’t romanticize but can’t help smiling at all the same.

6. The Master (2012)

“Maybe in the next life.”

(★★★★☆)

2012’s The Master is one of Paul Thomas Anderson’s least accessible projects - and certainly his single densest work - to date, being a deceptively simple narrative masking a dual-character study about losing yourself and finding the perfect someone else. A 50s-set tale of an alcoholic WWII veteran falling into the spell of a glorified science fiction writer that seeks to put a leash on everything but his own ambitions, The Master proves full of an embarrassment of thematic riches and bittersweet tragedy at every turn. Until the release of the VistaVision-shot, IMAX-projected One Battle After Another, The Master was unequivocally Anderson’s most cinematically gorgeous work, thanks in immense part to its resurrection of 70mm film stock, which had not been used for the production and projection of a narrative film since 1996’s Hamlet. The Master seeks to explore why we all do the things we do and, by extension, why we love the people we love. As “Master” Lancaster Dodd (the Late Great Phillip Seymour Hoffman at the height of his powers), enters into his scholarly infatuated tango with Freddie (played to perfection by a career-best Joaquin Phoenix), the latter finally finds the anchor he has been searching for in every partner he has met since the teenage sweetheart he abandoned out of a perpetual calling to wander–until he concedes once again to that desire and Dodd becomes even further fascinated by Freddie’s broken psyche (a product of what wouldn’t be called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder until twenty years later, when an entirely new generation of American men had already been redeployed to repeat the doomed cycle (see Inherent Vice)). There is effectively a thirteen-minute staring contest that serves as an act-off between Phoenix and Hoffman that remains Anderson’s best singular scene to date. Where I take issue with The Master is my failure to fully connect with both its intentionally complicated characters and make sense of its final few minutes. Then again, Anderson has proclaimed The Master as the best movie he has ever made, if not entirely successful, so what do I know?

5. Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

“I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine.”

(★★★★½)

PTA’s first rom-com has, of course, become one of the genre’s staples, and it isn’t hard to see why. Both structurally and narratively, Punch-Drunk Love is a very bizarre movie. For being centered on a romance plot between two characters, the film doesn’t seem particularly interested in the specifics of their relationship–because, for all intents and purposes, that’s not really what it’s about. In his foray into drama after almost a decade in slapstick comedy, Adam Sandler stars as Barry Egan, a socially challenged plunger salesman with near-superhuman strength and an affinity for pudding. Opposite him is Emily Watson as Lena Leonard, a quiet but adorable bachelorette who pulls Barry further and further out of his comfort zone. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though, as right when Lena makes Barry feel wholly seen for the first time in his life - being that he was raised surrounded by seven other sisters - he is bombarded by a phone sex operator, an impeccably angry Phillip Seymour Hoffman… and a little piano that propels the entire narrative. Barry must manage protecting his new love, thwarting gangs of debt collectors, and suppressing spasms of anger that come out in hulkish spurts. One particular sequence in the middle is some of the most relatably anxiety-inducing filmmaking ever accomplished, thanks to Jon Brion’s propulsive score. These spasms of bright colors twinkle across the screen in transitory moments, and the grounded yet slightly elevated aesthetic of everything makes the movie feel more like a hazy dream than a tried-and-true love story. The final product is, sure, a romantic comedy, but the movie is truly about what it means to propel yourself into love when that’s the last thing you feel capable of receiving. When you’re swallowed up by everything going wrong - all your flaws and mistakes and red flags and misdeeds—how can there be room for love? If Barry finds a way, so can we all. Aw geez.

4. Inherent Vice (2014)

“You can only cruise the boulevards of regret so far.

Then you gotta get back up onto the freeway again.”

(★★★★½)

Inherent Vice is, among many, many things, an understandably polarizing film. Often found near the tail-end of lists like this one, the movie follows a private detective named Larry “Doc” Sportello (another delightful Joaquin Phoenix) who, after being prompted by an ex-girlfriend, stumbles through a cloud of marijuana smoke down a rabbit hole filled with nazis, FBI informants, lots of drugs, and a career-best Josh Brolin as a character named Lieutenant Detective Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen in 1970’s California. The thing about Inherent Vice is, among its many swirling plotlines and questionable chronology, you would be hard-pressed to find an ounce of directorial handholding - a fate perhaps perfectly in line with being a Thomas Pynchon adaptation. Where something like The Master requires time to digest its colossal thematic content, Inherent Vice may require another viewing just to parse exactly what the hell is going on. Despite it being easily PTA’s funniest movie to date, through the weed haze and star-studded cast of characters (including the brilliant trio of Owen Wilson, Benecio Del Toro, and Martin Short) exists a surprisingly poignant breakup movie about living, remembering, and letting go—both of love and the aspirations of a nation dissolving before a generation’s eyes. Doc tumbles down on an insatiable journey to make sense of an America where every cop is interested in doing anything but helping him, a coalition of as mundane an occupation as dentists appears caught up in an international drug trade, and Uncle Sam himself seems addicted to sending his finest young men off to suicide in the jungle. Fragmented memories strangle any semblance of clarity or linearity, but those pitch-black hippie feet will keep marching forward through the faded world of late-stage capitalism—if only propelled by the fear of what will happen if they dare to stop.

3. There Will Be Blood (2007)

“I thank God I have none of you in me.”

(★★★★★)

Undeniably PTA’s most recognizable work to date in terms of both photography and performance, the thematic resonance of There Will Be Blood’s flawless screenplay acts as a mere cherry on top of its colossal eminence. One of the single greatest and most iconic novel-to-film adaptations ever put to screen, thwarted only by happening to release in the same year as the other greatest, most iconic novel-to-film adaptation ever put to screen. Though, even with best picture and adapted screenplay beat out, Josh Brolin’s No Country greasy middle-part and quasi-pornstache could never be enough to overtake Daniel Day-Lewis in what is (although borderline comedically-praised) probably the single best film performance of the 21st century. There Will Be Blood, a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, follows Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, a self-proclaimed people-hating Oil Man who totes around his son as a selling point to get his grimy hands on more drilling land. Pestering him through the narrative is Paul Dano’s Eli Sunday, a priest whose lifelong commitment to Christianity slowly unravels against Plainview’s bond to the cherished oil that may as well pump through his veins. While I don’t know much about Oil! or its descriptive prose, I do know that the images in There Will Be Blood elevate it to another plane. That isn’t to detract from Jonny Greenwood’s impeccable score, which elevates even the most mundane sequences of Plainview measuring land or pondering whether or not to abandon his boy to explosive intensity, but it is Robert Elswit’s Oscar-winning cinematography that truly paints this profitably painful (or painfully profitable) tale of market, religion, and family. Airtight and never missing a beat, There Will Be Blood spans three decades in the life of Plainview, who proves he’ll either die or kill by the cross of capitalism until he can finally declare when he’s finished on his own terms.

2. One Battle After Another (2025)

“This pussy don’t pop for you.”

(★★★★★)

A full-length review of One Battle After Another by staff writer Matthew Colandrea can be found here.

One Battle After Another is, yes, a complete formal home run, but it’s also astonishing in the simple fact that it exists. Shot an entire year ago, One Battle After Another serves as a nauseatingly clairvoyant tale that derives most of its uproarious laughs from the comically insecure cruelty of White-nationalist logic. The film opens with a revolutionary group charging an immigration camp by storm and freeing its detainees, as Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills seeks to humiliate a career-best Sean Penn as (soon-to-be) Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, only to unleash a fetishistic fire within him that he must learn to quell both physically and spiritually sixteen years later in order to be accepted into a Neo-Nazi subset of Santa worshippers. In these sixteen years, Perfidia’s daughter has all grown up into a rebel of her own, and her stoner ex-revolutionary dad (a sublime Leonardo DiCaprio) seems to find avoiding demystifying his daughter’s understanding of her mother easier than raising her at all. On paper, the film sounds like an explosive mess of plotlines and themes, but the end result is somehow Anderson’s most accessible film that speeds through its 170 minute runtime. While DiCaprio and Penn have their Oscar noms locked, Teyena Taylor uses her brief time onscreen to remind us that more people should have seen A Thousand and One, and Regina Hall is surprisingly captivating in a quietly dramatic role. Benecio Del Toro returns in what is probably my personal favorite performance in any PTA film to date, but it is first-timer Chase Infiniti (what a name) that absolutely steals the show. Anderson and Co. saw her casting as the structural make-or-break of the entire project, and Infiniti both supports and uplifts every single moment she is in frame. There is an action sequence around the halfway point that spans the underground railroad of the fictional sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, and Jonny Greenwood once again reminds us he is one of the all time greats. It is, though, as you’ve seen in every trailer and poster for this movie, the ‘climactic road’ that takes the cake: the soil whose native right is being fought over rolls like ocean waves in the blistering heat as rival ideologies crash into its peaks. The revolution will not be televised; it will be shot on VistaVision and projected in IMAX 70 millimeter.

1. Magnolia (1999)

“but it did happen”

(★★★★★)

Alas, if you know me personally, or are adept in the process of elimination, you’ve gathered this was inevitable. While OBAA and Punch-Drunk Love are certainly hopeful stories within their contexts, Magnolia is an ode to the wonderful propulsion inherent to simply being human. This is not a happy film; in fact, it's unabashedly Anderson’s saddest. A three-hour-long beatdown of tragic intertwining stories: two dying fathers, an estranged son and daughter, a regretful soon-to-be widow, an exploitative parent and a child exploited, and two hopeless romantics all bumbling their way through life. Kicked off by a stellarly creative and immediately engrossing cold open, Magnolia’s truths and tragedies swirl around the power of connection and coincidence - or perhaps the very intentional circumstances that are simply labelled as such. Stories of charming romance, the struggle of loneliness, and suppressed trauma bubble up and pour over the edge of a third act of inexplicable absurdity, culminating in a final frame that reminds you that in the wake of it all, love - and hope - are in fact possible. You can overcome your past, you can move forward, and not only are you capable of living, you must. Magnolia pulls you down into a dark hole, if only to show you how to climb back out, moving faster and farther than you were before. It feels as if everything Anderson has created throughout his career, both before and after, culminates in either direction back to this: an odyssey that seeks to anchor the human experience in all but anything grounded. All too much like life itself, Magnolia fills you with many emotions - most of them miserable - and then puts its warm hand on your shoulder just to remind you that everything is indeed going to be okay. Yes, it did happen, but you are so much more than it. Oh man.

Carlos Jimenez is a freshman at Columbia College studying Film and Neuroscience. He enjoys writing, running, and hopelessly rooting for the Yankees.

@carlos.s.jimenez