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Sun 9 August 2026 18:45, UK
It’s a tall task for anyone to size up Paul Thomas Anderson’s towering filmography and pick out his finest hour.
Across his ten features, you’ll find some of the most celebrated works of contemporary cinema. Possessed with a fierce storytelling gift as a teen, the precocious Anderson would eventually forge a path to Hollywood while still in his 20s, creating short films that would be expanded into his first two Hard Eight and Boogie Nights pictures in the late 1990s. Before long, Anderson would stand as one of the leading forces of 21st-century Hollywood, writing and directing the acclaimed There Will Be Blood and The Master.
A gripping thread would soon emerge of Anderson’s highly distinctive auteur eye. Long takes, intense close-ups, and unbroken tracking shots all imbue Anderson’s work with an unmistakable air, floating through his sequences like a phantasmic voyeur bearing witness to his flawed protagonists’ character studies among the American cultural landscape.
But his finest? There’s probably no better authority than the man himself, who once quipped to reporters at a press circuit in December 1999 just what picture he thought would stand as his greatest. “I have a feeling, one of those gut feelings, that I’ll make pretty good movies the rest of my life,” he told the room with candour. “And maybe I’ll make some clunkers, maybe I’ll make some winners, but I guess the way that I really feel is that Magnolia is, for better or worse, the best movie I’ll ever make.”
“Clunkers” has yet to happen; pretty much every movie under Anderson’s belt met with near-unanimous critical praise, and his assessment of his oeuvre back in 1999 failed to predict later glories under his directing and writing credit. But Magnolia best distils everything about the Anderson formula, casting a vast web of intermingling lost souls trying to find happiness and meaning in the San Fernando Valley.
The seeds of Magnolia came to Anderson during Boogie Nights’ extensive editing period. He wasn’t even 30, but New Line Cinema were so confident in the young filmmaker that they promised Anderson to fund whatever concept he wished to develop, as well as final cut privileges.
Initially floating the idea of an “intimate and small-scale” project, an obsession with the lyrical characters that dot Aimee Mann’s first two solo albums and advances of her upcoming third began to shape Magnolia into a grander epic drama.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
It would stand as one of the great ensemble casts, illustrating further Anderson’s narrative grasp of nebulous plot yet still laser-focused on the generational trauma jumping between the disparate characters of game show hosts, religious cops, pick-up gurus, and terminally ill TV honchos.
Magnolia would be seen as a triumph by fans and critics alike, but according to the director, its protracted cinematic style didn’t thrill him years later. When participating in a Reddit AMA, Anderson answered the question of what he would tell himself if he were to go back to the production of his 1999 big screen gem: “Chill the fuck out and cut 20 minutes.”
