Every Paul Thomas Anderson Movie, Ranked from Worst to Best - Including 'One Battle After Another'

"In an unpredictable filmography that spans from the waining days of the mid-'90s indie boom to the tenuous post-celluloid landscape of the modern age - a scattershot collection of stories that hops across the last 100 years as though it's unstuck in time, resolving into a strange and feral people's history of America in the 20th century - a fundamental sense of inherent vice might be the most consistent through-line."

"Common wisdom suggests that Anderson's career has been split down the middle, with 2002's "Punch-Drunk Love" functioning as a gentle transition from the exuberant mosaics that announced PTA's genius to the steely micro-portraits that made good on his potential. And while there's a certain amount of truth to that superficial overview, the evolution of Anderson's style is mostly interesting for how it illuminates the underlying things that bind his entire body of work together."

"With "One Battle After Another" soon to arrive in theaters, we've decided to rank Paul Thomas Anderson's films from worst to best (essentially just assigning them varying degrees of greatness), focusing on all things that have changed in his movies, and all the things that have stayed the same. 11. "Hard Eight" aka "Sydney" (1996) Paul Thomas Anderson was only 26 when he managed to wrangle Philip Baker Hall and a $3 million budget for his first feature, an impressive feat by any measure."

Paul Thomas Anderson's characters are consistently defective, often broken and incomplete. The filmography is unpredictable, ranging from the mid-'90s indie era to the modern post-celluloid landscape. Stories leap across the last century, creating a scattershot, unstuck-in-time portrait that coalesces into a feral people's history of 20th-century America. An underlying sense of inherent vice recurs through the work. Phantom Thread relocates to London while retaining a focus on obsessive people with holes in their hearts. The career is commonly viewed as split around Punch-Drunk Love, with evolution of style revealing enduring through-lines that bind the films.

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