Daniel Day-Lewis gives the best performance of his career.

Rating: 9/10 (27 October 2018)

My Rating : 9/10
Paul Thomas Anderson took the first few pages from Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! and ran with them taking creative freedom to bring us this modern day classic. Oil! is more focused on the political and socioeconomic side of the oil boom that occurred in California during the early 1900's and the class warfare that was being waged, whereas Anderson's screenplay is focused on a story of a man, his son, and their relationship which makes for better cinema than the original source material. Daniel Day-Lewis gives the best performance of his career (obviously in my humble opinion) as Daniel Plainview: a wealthy independent oil man, who battles with the big oil conglomerates along with a vengeful Evangelical Eli Sunday (played fantastically by Paul Dano) all the while trying to do right for himself and his son. Anderson delivers a cinematic masterpiece in every sense of the word and it should have won the Academy Award for Best Picture, but it was beat out by No Country for Old Men. Though No Country is a great film it is nowhere near the level of There Will Be Blood.