This Is What It's Like Now: On "One Battle After Another"

Hello! Whether this is reaching you in your inbox or your Substack feed, thank you for checking out this post! If you like it, please consider sharing this piece and/or becoming a subscriber! This newsletter is an effort to make writing a consistent, sustainable part of my life. Your support enables me to devote the time and effort necessary to produce articles like this! Thank you so much for reading! Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the all-time great America directors. He does not always make great films - in fact, he usually doesn’t. He does not have some uniquely sophisticated sensibility or an unparalleled formal eye. But his films are evidently the work of someone who is a generational talent in his field, and he makes it obvious. The fruits of his labor are never invisible. His movies always look disproportionately expensive to their budget. He wrangles memorable performances out of his actors, no matter how few lines they have. Much of his work is comparable to DJ’ing, in that t

Hello! Whether this is reaching you in your inbox or your Substack feed, thank you for checking out this post! If you like it, please consider sharing this piece and/or becoming a subscriber! This newsletter is an effort to make writing a consistent, sustainable part of my life. Your support enables me to devote the time and effort necessary to produce articles like this! Thank you so much for reading! Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the all-time great America directors. He does not always make great films - in fact, he usually doesn’t. He does not have some uniquely sophisticated sensibility o