Paul Thomas Anderson took home his first Oscars (for best picture, director and adapted screenplay) at last night’s Academy Awards, which may come as a surprise to those who have long considered him one of our finest filmmakers. But it’s a satisfying payoff for the writer and director, 55, who has spent nearly three decades synthesizing his copious influences and experimental instincts into a distinctive, inimitable style of his own. A look at his films to date, and where to see them, below.
‘Hard Eight’ (1997)
Stream it on Paramount+ and MGM+; rent or buy it on major platforms.
Anderson was put through the wringer on his feature directorial debut, which was recut and retitled by its production company, Rysher Entertainment. Anderson’s preferred moniker was “Sydney,” after its main character, a professional gambler who takes a desperate young man under his wing and teaches him the ropes. The character actor Philip Baker Hall is marvelous as Sydney, projecting both an offhand warmth and steely demeanor, and John C. Reilly is sweet and sympathetic as John, his protégé; Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson shine in sharp supporting roles.
‘Boogie Nights’ (1997)
Stream it on the Criterion Channel and Hulu; rent or buy it on major platforms.
Anderson brought back some of his “Hard Eight” cast for his sophomore effort, a sprawling, dizzying, dazzling chronicle of the adult movie scene in the San Fernando Valley from the late 1970s through the early ’80s. Mark Wahlberg (in what remains his finest screen performance) stars as Dirk Diggler, a kid from the Valley whose, ahem, generous proportions make him an instant star in the industry. Burt Reynolds, playing a director, and Julianne Moore, portraying an actress, were both nominated for Oscars for their turns in the film. They become something of a surrogate family for Dirk and an assortment of actors, crew and hangers-on. Fast and funny, joyful and heartbreaking, this was the breakthrough picture that earned Anderson an Oscar nomination for original screenplay and established him as one to watch.
‘Magnolia’ (1999)
Stream it on Hulu; rent or buy it on major platforms.
The director has never been shy about his affection for Robert Altman, and that influence was most clear in his “Boogie Nights” follow-up, a multi-strand, interweaving narrative in the style of “Nashville” and “Short Cuts.” Much of the big “Boogie Nights” ensemble returns, alongside the movie’s guest star, Tom Cruise, who nabbed an Oscar nomination for his turn as the kind of “self-help” misogynist who’d be a big hit in today’s manosphere. Running more than three hours and featuring operatic monologues, a biblical rain of frogs and a showstopping musical number, it’s a big swing of a movie whose earnestness remains endearing.
‘Punch-Drunk Love’ (2002)
Rent or buy it on major platforms.
After the draining experience of “Magnolia,” Anderson wanted to take it easy, envisioning a compact comedy with one of his favorite stars, Adam Sandler. But Anderson, being Anderson, was never going to just crank out a “Billy Madison”-style throwaway; their collaboration would be a tangy stew of their sensibilities, placing Sandler’s stock character of a shy rage-aholic into a deliciously twisted romance, pairing the goofball comic with the Oscar-nominated “Breaking the Waves” star Emily Watson. It shouldn’t come together, but it somehow does, a delicate exploration of the perils of anxiety and the peculiarities of true love.
‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007)
Stream it on Paramount+; rent or buy it on major platforms.
Anderson would take five years to make his next feature, and in that time, would reconfigure his style from the electric aesthetics of a ’90s indie wunderkind to the classical style of a John Huston or John Ford. Freely adapting Upton Sinclair’s novel “Oil!,” he tells the story of Daniel Plainview (an Oscar-winning Daniel Day-Lewis), an early 20th-century oilman locked in a fierce battle over land (and of wills) with the preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). “Blood” was his most ambitious effort to that time, a big-canvas period drama, and it drew some of his most rapturous reviews (as well as his first best director Oscar nomination); it would also mark his first collaboration with the composer Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, which continues to this day.
‘The Master’ (2012)
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video or Tubi; rent or buy it on major platforms.
For his fourth (and, sadly, final) collaboration with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anderson penned this 1950s drama, inspired by the early days of Scientology. Hoffman plays Lancaster Dodd, the L. Ron Hubbard-esque leader of “The Cause”; Joaquin Phoenix is Freddie Quell, a damaged World War II veteran who falls under Lancaster’s spell. Historical analogues aside, “The Master” is essentially a two-hander, dramatizing the sometimes tempestuous, often affectionate, but clearly codependent dynamic between these two men, whom Hoffman and Phoenix bring to life with ferocity and force.
‘Inherent Vice’ (2014)
Rent or buy it on major platforms.
Phoenix and Anderson re-teamed for this adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel, in which a perpetually stoned private detective (Phoenix) encounters an array of eccentrics and elites while investigating the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend’s wealthy new lover. Anderson retains the novel’s 1970 setting, but the vibes are decidedly different than “Boogie Nights,” keying in on the Manson-tinged darkness of the waning days of the ’60s. Loose-limbed and wildly unpredictable, this is one of Anderson’s funniest and strangest pictures.
‘Phantom Thread’ (2017)
Stream it on the Criterion Channel; rent or buy it on major platforms.
Another reunion, this time with “Blood” star Daniel Day-Lewis, who helped Anderson conceive the character of Reynolds Woodcock, a dressmaker in 1950s London. When he meets Alma (Vicky Krieps), she seems the next in a long line of young, beautiful muses, but what could have been a standard-issue romance — and a typical portrayal of a difficult male genius and the damage he leaves in his wake — becomes something more thorny and complicated. Day-Lewis is as absorbing as ever, but Krieps and Lesley Manville steal the show as his worthy adversaries.
‘Licorice Pizza’ (2021)
Stream it on Netflix; rent or buy it on major platforms.
Anderson’s third ’70s-set movie is also his most cheerful, a sun-kissed coming-of-age story about first love (and lust). Cooper Hoffman is Gary Valentine, an ambitious young hustler who develops a crippling crush on the spiky Alana (the musician Alana Haim, making her bravura feature film debut). There is a plot, of sorts, but this is one of Anderson’s most delightfully shaggy ventures, a charming hang in which neither jealousy nor uncertainty nor the oil crisis can spoil the good vibes.
‘One Battle After Another’ (2025)
Stream it on HBO Max; rent or buy it on major platforms.
Anderson’s Oscar winner (nominated for 13, winner of six) and most acclaimed picture to date was in the works for decades, first getting into the filmmaker’s head (and under his skin) in the form of the 1990 Pynchon novel “Vineland.” Over the years, that story evolved into Anderson’s tale of Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio, pitch perfect), a burned-out formula revolutionary whose years of paranoia are finally borne out when a twisted military man (Sean Penn) organizes the kidnapping of Bob’s daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). The Oscar triumph of “Battle” is appropriate; it feels like the culmination of Anderson’s screen work to date, fusing the loosey-goosey friskiness of his early work with the more disciplined aesthetics and towering performances of his middle period.
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