“To music that sounds like a hive of angry bees, Daniel Day-Lewis falls down an oil well he's digging and breaks his foot in the opening moments of Paul Thomas Anderson's oil epic. Based on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil, about a clash of capitalism and religion at the turn of the last century, this sometimes magnificent, decidedly strange film is a portrait of a terrible, rapacious man.
“The American Dream, or perhaps simple greed, has turned him into a sociopath, though there are moments when he seems briefly empathetic — adopting the infant son of a fellow well-digger who's killed in an accident, or opening up his life to a stranger who shows up claiming to be a brother he never knew he had. These flashes of humanity don't turn out well, however, and the character's as hard to like as he is hardbitten.
“The imagery — an oil boom town is built before your eyes, then nearly burns down in a Western landscape that seems a character in its own right — is undeniably powerful. Anderson proves to have a real eye for epic filmmaking.” - NPR