The Cinematheque

“[The director’s] most ambitious and surprising film yet … The tension between Anderson’s wicked sense of humour and his immaculate craftsmanship … is potent stuff.”

Adam Nayman, Sight and Sound

A prestige period piece set in the high-end fashion world of 1950s London gradually gives way to a delectably perverse portrait of marriage in Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterful 2017 film, among the high points of American cinema in the last decade. Daniel Day-Lewis, Oscar winner for his previous PTA collaboration There Will Be Blood, is predictably captivating as the fastidious Reynolds Woodcock, greying king of the haute couture and serial bachelor on account of a must-not-disturb routine. Vicky Krieps, in her breakout role, is Alma, the lowly waitress with ideal proportions who enters into a muse-like relationship with Woodcock, then holds her own in a twisted game of one-upmanship and lovers’ cuisine. The film’s dark horse, however, is the dressmaker’s icy sister (Lesley Manville), whose protectiveness over her brother, still stunted by the death of their mother, is slowly usurped by the crafty interloper. Nominated for multiple Oscars, including the first for composer Jonny Greenwood.

“A movie as precise as it is delirious … [Its] uniqueness is its fluidly shifting tone, as if the ghosts of genres as diverse as gothic mysteries (Hitchcock’s Rebecca), screwball comedies (Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby), perverse, obsessional romances (Kubrick’s Lolita), and Angela Carter’s feminist inversions of classic fairy tales were dancing at the edge of the collective consciousness of everyone involved, including the viewer.”

Amy Taubin, Artforum

“A chamber piece, romantic and baroque in equal measure, with arresting harmonies and ravishing changes of tone … [One] can’t quite capture how bizarre this movie is. Or how bizarrely true to life—to art, to love, to itself—it feels.”

A.O. Scott, The New York Times