Actor

Kevin J. O'Connor

3: briefs
13:00: average
39 min: in total

On film.briefs3

Inherent Vice

Paul Thomas Anderson · 2014

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice (2014) adapts Thomas Pynchon’s labyrinthine 2009 novel into a sun-bleached, jazz-scored neo-noir set in 1970 Los Angeles. Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc Sportello, a stoner PI drawn into overlapping conspiracies involving real estate, organised crime, and institutional rot. Anchored by Phoenix’s understated performance and Robert Elswit’s hazy cinematography, the film favours mood and texture over narrative resolution — a deliberate, affectionate surrender to ambiguity.

13:00

The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson · 2012

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 drama follows Freddie Quell, a volatile WWII veteran, as he falls under the influence of Lancaster Dodd, leader of a fledgling philosophical movement. Shot almost entirely on 65 mm film, it relies on Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s physically precise performances, Jonny Greenwood’s jagged score, and a structure that favours ambiguity over exposition. Set in 1945–46, it explores post-war dislocation, the seduction of certainty, and the limits of personal transformation — without offering diagnosis, satire or resolution.

13:00

There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson · 2007

There Will Be Blood follows Daniel Plainview, a silver miner turned oilman, across roughly three decades of the Californian oil boom, loosely adapting Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! Daniel Day-Lewis plays Plainview opposite Paul Dano's preacher Eli Sunday, with Jonny Greenwood's score and Robert Elswit's cinematography setting a tone closer to horror than period drama. Anderson's screenplay narrows Sinclair's sprawling novel to its first chapters and lets one man's ambition curdle into something closer to a diagnosis than a character study.