The Master (2012)

...means to unsettle—not through the startling violence of Punch Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood, or the emotional crescendos of Magnolia, but through a central relationship that’s played for the highest stakes.

An often brilliant ’50s-throwback character drama that never feels nostalgic, with terrific central performances and a luminous, unforgettable visual beauty.

It's an arresting and utterly absorbing psychological drama of marginal lives, an emotional history of charlatanism and gimcrack philosophy, a world of snakeoil truth salesmen offering self-medication of the spirit...

I auteuren Paul Thomas Andersons seneste kunststykke ligger alt på en gyngende grund, og publikum svuppes ud af kuvøsen i en film, der tør tage kunstneriske virkemidler i brug uden at forfalde til lette kompromisser.

...nothing short of an alternate history to the bobby-socked, Panglossed Fifties, a bracing antidote to our rose-colored pictures of prosperity and suburban domesticity.