Phantom Thread (2017)

Paul Thomas Anderson has his finger on the pulse of crafting veiled characters. Characters who you come to know quite intimately, and come close to empathizing with, and yet still know that you disagree with them fundamentally. He did this in there will be blood and he did it here; you grow accustomed to the protagonist and believe their actions to be just but after letting the movie sit and brew in your mind, you realize how awful the characters really are. This, of course, Is aided by the absolutely knockout performance by Daniel day Lewis in both films as well as the amount of long- take sequences. Paul Thomas Anderson is a master at capturing the emotions of the characters by allowing the scene to breathe. The world feels so visceral that even though the tools he uses to manifest that, such as dresses, the set design, or the music feel even secondary.

Last note: the music was as tantamount to achieving the sucking into the world effect as the long take sequences. He carefully selects moments to either play out the eerie few note melodies or to omit them from the scene altogether. This movie is going to make me think long about the price of genius; what I think the theme of the movie really is