What’s that?  A critically hyped film that actually deserves the praise?  Damn skippy.  One of the leaders of the whole MTV set of film makers – and one of the very best ever when it comes to using music in film – Magnolia’s P.T. Anderson has gone and grown up leaving his trademark non-stop dialogue, style for style’s sake, and “Hey look, I’m smart!” moments behind and the result is flat out stunning: American film making at its finest.

Opening with a lengthy sequence that plays entirely without dialogue, There Will Be Blood is a sparse, ruthless film, one that works equally well as an extended character study and a scathing criticism of America itself, specifically the peculiar fusion of religion and capitalism that lies at the nation’s core.  Arguably one of the finest actors of his generation, Daniel Day Lewis is at his absolute finest as heartless oil man Daniel Plainview. But, good as Lewis is, he’s matched step for step – possibly even out done in a few scenes – by the young Paul Dano as fundamentalist preacher Eli Sunday.

The ongoing rivalry between the two – each as coldly amoral and self serving as the other, though in entirely different ways – is absolutely fascinating, each man needing the other every bit as much as he despises him.

It’s not nearly as flashy as his earlier work but Anderson proves here that he can do an awful lot more with an awful lot less and now that he’s realized that he never needed the gimmickry in the first place the future’s pretty much unlimited.  Okay, there’s maybe one trace of the past in having Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood do the score, but it’s so subtle you’d never know it was him if you weren’t told …