Wow. I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything like it. Sure, there are echoes of Griffith, Welles, Wyler, Huston, Kubrick, Malick, and Coppola but There Will Be Blood is its own beast—a remarkably assured, unpretentious, muscular work of American filmmaking (I’ll compare it right now to Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Part II and Raging Bull). Anderson tells an epic narrative of power and providence, fathers and sons, religion and commerce, sin and hypocrisy; and he is assisted by a towering, career-defining performance from Daniel Day Lewis. Lewis is rail-thin, his shoulders hunched forward, his body askew and slightly out of balance; nevertheless, his Daniel Plainview is a determined, singularly-obsessed yet tortured maverick of a character, and Lewis fills the screen with a searing, charismatic, misanthropic intensity. He is equally matched by Paul Dano who mesmerizes as the evangelical preacher who won’t back down as well as this preturnaturally astute child actor, Dillon Freasier, who plays Plainview’s son H.W. Jonny Greenwood’s score punctuates Robert Elswit’s hardscrabbled images with scraping discordant notes. I can’t think of a thing I would want changed and can’t wait to see it again. Run, don’t walk.