The Master

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

2012 / 138min / 35mm

Anderson’s aching, ambitious, and deeply ambiguous psychodrama pairs alcoholic ex-serviceman Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and messianic flimflam man Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in a cage match bromance that doubles as a meditation on the groundswell of new faiths—Dodd’s Scientology-like “The Cause” as well as, implicitly, Method acting—amid postwar American prosperity. Sensuous and strange, and one of the premiere cinematic accomplishments of this decade.

Part of Ethics of Care