A collection of reviews from major publications for "The Master" complied for posterity. Recommended reading for after you've seen the film.
REVIEWS
"Even when the narrative drifts into increasingly ambiguous waters, the sheer brilliance of the filmmaking holds one rapt."
NY Times
"It is a movie about the lure and folly of greatness that comes as close as anything I’ve seen recently to being a great movie. There will be skeptics, but the cult is already forming. Count me in."
LA Times
"It's a film bristling with vivid moments and unbeatable acting, but its interest is not in tidy narrative satisfactions but rather the excesses and extremes of human behavior, the interplay of troubled souls desperate to find their footing."
Rolling Stone
"The Master, the sixth film from the 42-year-old writer-director, affirms his position as the foremost filmmaking talent of his generation. Anderson is a rock star, the artist who knows no limits. Fierce and ferociously funny, The Master is a great movie, the best of the year so far, and a new American classic."
The New Yorker
"The tale of his dissolution, which consumes the first portion of the movie, casts a spell as bewitching, but also as controlled, as anything that the writer and director, Paul Thomas Anderson, has wrought before."
The Village Voice
"You might wish it gave you more in terms of comfort food pleasure, but that's not Anderson's problem. You've just seen too many movies about incommunicative fuck-ups who manage to break down their defenses at some convenient third-act moment, assuring that order will be restored."
"Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master is masterful for sure, as well as enthralling and perplexing. But an argument that will endure for as long as people feel like seeing and talking about the film is whether it adds up to the sum of its many brilliant parts."
New York Magazine
"Anderson’s latest and most glacial drama, The Master, is a piece of stark, often abrasive American mythmaking. Anderson is a romantic who has earned his nihilism. He clarifies nothing, but leaves us brooding on our own confusion."
NY Times
"It is a movie about the lure and folly of greatness that comes as close as anything I’ve seen recently to being a great movie. There will be skeptics, but the cult is already forming. Count me in."
LA Times
"It's a film bristling with vivid moments and unbeatable acting, but its interest is not in tidy narrative satisfactions but rather the excesses and extremes of human behavior, the interplay of troubled souls desperate to find their footing."
Rolling Stone
"The Master, the sixth film from the 42-year-old writer-director, affirms his position as the foremost filmmaking talent of his generation. Anderson is a rock star, the artist who knows no limits. Fierce and ferociously funny, The Master is a great movie, the best of the year so far, and a new American classic."
The New Yorker
"The tale of his dissolution, which consumes the first portion of the movie, casts a spell as bewitching, but also as controlled, as anything that the writer and director, Paul Thomas Anderson, has wrought before."
The Village Voice
"You might wish it gave you more in terms of comfort food pleasure, but that's not Anderson's problem. You've just seen too many movies about incommunicative fuck-ups who manage to break down their defenses at some convenient third-act moment, assuring that order will be restored."
"Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master is masterful for sure, as well as enthralling and perplexing. But an argument that will endure for as long as people feel like seeing and talking about the film is whether it adds up to the sum of its many brilliant parts."
New York Magazine
"Anderson’s latest and most glacial drama, The Master, is a piece of stark, often abrasive American mythmaking. Anderson is a romantic who has earned his nihilism. He clarifies nothing, but leaves us brooding on our own confusion."
Entertainment Weekly
"It's also one of the great movies of the year — an ambitious, challenging, and creatively hot-blooded but cool toned project that picks seriously at knotty ideas about American personality, success, rootlessness, master-disciple dynamics, and father-son mutually assured destruction."
Salon
"There are certainly passages of the sort of “Citizen Kane” ambition you expect from Anderson here, not least in the memorable leading performances by Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix and the magnificent wide-screen cinematography of Mihai Malaimare Jr."
Film Comment
"As always with Anderson, the character opposition borders on the schematic, and the structure threatens to come apart at the seams. But the courting of danger is exactly what makes his films so exciting, this new film most of all."
Slate
"...If that sounds a little abstract, that’s because, despite being transfixed for the whole of its 137-minute running time, I left the theater not entirely sure what The Master was about. I can’t wait to get back and see it again."
NPR
"Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master is both feverish and glacial. The vibe is chilly, but the central character is an unholy mess — and his rage saturates every frame."
Wall Street Journal
""The Master" is a big, brave and universal saga of a man who, in the words of Dodd's wife, "can't take this life straight," and who vouchsafes his vestigial faith to a brilliant riddler wrapped up in an enigma. As gifts to homo sapiens go, it's a rich one."
Associated Press
"Anderson, long a master himself of technique and tone, has created a startling, stunningly gorgeous film shot in lushly vibrant 65mm, with powerful performances all around and impeccable production design."
"After one viewing, The Master already feels like a landmark American movie. It makes words like ‘bold’ and ‘extraordinary’ seem utterly inadequate."
"It is a movie that may alienate and exasperate some, but its audacity, its formal daring and Joaquin Phoenix's performance, make it simply unmissable."
"For the moment, we’re simply pleased that the film marks an undeniable progression in the career of one of our most gifted directors."
"Elliptical but hardly indecisive, testy but hardly incendiary, Anderson's exquisitely sculpted film is about more individual-based values and desires than its grabby advance reputation as a Scientology exposé promised: trust, admiration, sex, kinship."
The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
Movieline
"The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind."
The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referraldf
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referraldf
The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
"A film that’s majestic and masterly if not a masterpiece, which draws sustenance from masters of the past, filmic, literary and artistic, and is pinioned by two colossal characters as it recounts the early, stuttering formation of a Scientology-style self-help belief system."
"This is an important, intelligent, epic and yet intimate piece of filmmaking from a master at the height of his powers."
"It’s that aggressively enigmatic type of storytelling that makes The Master the most cryptic film Anderson has made yet. It’s often an electrifying move, removing us from scene-to-scene concerns that Freddie clearly gives no mind to, and powerfully distilling the volcanic emotion of the situations."
AWARDS
Venice Film Festival
Winner Silver Lion (Best Director) - Paul Thomas Anderson
Winner Best Actor (tie) - Joaquin Phoenix & Philip Seymour Hoffman
IFP Gotham Awards
Nominee Best Feature
Sight & Sound
Winner Best Film of 2012
LA Film Critics
Winner Best Director - Paul Thomas Anderson
Winner Best Actor - Joaquin Phoenix
Winner Best Supporting Actress - Amy Adams
Winner Best Production Design - Jack Fisk & David Crank
Runner-Up Best Film
Runner-Up Best Cinematography - Mihai Malaimare Jr.
Runner-Up Best Music Score - Jonny Greenwood
Boston Film Critics
Winner Best Cinematography - Mihai Malaimare Jr.
Runner-Up Best Director - Paul Thomas Anderson
Washington DC Film Critics
Winner Best Supporting Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman
Winner Best Score - Jonny Greenwood
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