There Will Be Blood (2007)

In There Will Be Blood, the gifted young writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson explores themes of greed, family, and religion through an erupting fountain of the world’s most valuable resource. Although loosely based on the first 150 pages of Upton Sinclair’s anti-capitalist novel Oil!, the movie intentionally diverges from Sinclair’s socialist message, instead teaching us a lesson in how not to live a life. Through Anderson’s prodigious filmmaking talents and an immortal performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, the film’s ugly subject, There Will Be Blood leaves a permanent impression on all viewers who choose to immerse themselves in its richly realized universe of oil, money, and hatred.

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The Tree of Life (2011)

To set the record straight, I am not a white, Christian boy who grew up in a white, Christian family in mid-twentieth century Waco, Texas. I am a second-generation Indian immigrant born in Norman, Oklahoma and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. I have never been to church, doors are always locked in the neighborhoods I have lived in, and I have never been forced to call my father “sir.” Why is it, then, that I feel such a strong connection to The Tree of Life’s Jack O’Brien, such a peculiar proximity to his feelings and experiences?

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