There Will Be Blood: a classic? Photograph: PA
There Will Be Blood's march to victory this awards season has been almost as relentless as that of Daniel Day-Lewis's pertinacious oil man, Daniel Plainview. And the critics are overwhelmingly of the opinion that Paul Thomas Anderson's latest is a bona fide classic.
"This is a film ... that has overshot the runway of movie modernity with something thrillingly, dangerously new," writes our own Peter Bradshaw, while the BBC's Neil Smith calls the film "hypnotic, poetic and often downright strange".
Empire Magazine's Helen O'Hara says it is "uncompromising, intelligent and searing cinema", while Variety's Todd McCarthy labels the film "boldly and magnificently strange".
McCarthy adds: "Daniel Plainview is a profoundly anti-social fellow, malevolently so, and There Will Be Blood devotes itself to scratching, peeling and digging away at a man determined to divest himself of his past and everyone associated with it."
We searched far and wide for a negative review, but apart from this mildly negative piece from Roger Ebert, the only critic we could find who really disliked the film was Ross Anthony of rossanthony.com.
"Despite its 2.5 hour length, when the screen went black, I was shocked," he writes. "Where was the rest of the film? Where was that magnificent scene toward which the whole film had been building?"
What did you think of There Will Be Blood? Did you want to drink Day-Lewis's milkshake? Or did the whole project have the stink of actorly ham all over it?
