LA Weekly critics love Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood:
As for There Will Be Blood, about which you will be reading much more in the pages of the Weekly over the coming weeks, I will say only this: There are great films (like No Country For Old Men) and then there are films that send shock waves through the very landscape of cinema, that instantly stake a claim on a place in the canon. Often, such vanguard works fail to be fully understood or appreciated at the moment they first appear, as some of the initial reviews that greeted Psycho, 2001 and Bonnie and Clyde attest. There Will Be Blood belongs in their company, and I consider myself fortunate to belong to a group with the foresight to recognize it in its own moment.
I’m looking forward to There Will Be Blood as much as anyone but to congratulate yourself on recognizing a future masterpiece is a fine bit of hubris. Especially when it’s likely to be one of the best reviewed films of the year. This is why I tend to read critics for their writing abilities and not necessarily their opinions.