Every Paul Thomas Anderson Film Ranked

Paul Thomas Anderson has spent nearly 30 years making movies about difficult people who desperately want connection, control, money, love, or some messy combination of all four. With 2025’s One Battle After Another expanding his filmography to 10 features and earning approximately $213 million worldwide, there’s never been a better excuse to argue about which PTA movie belongs at the top.

The Ranking, From Good to Nearly Untouchable

10. Hard Eight (1996)

Anderson’s debut already has the ingredients he’d spend decades refining: damaged men, strange surrogate families, gambling, humiliation and Philip Baker Hall looking like he knows exactly how your night will end. It’s controlled and confident for a first feature, but compared with what followed, you can still see the director figuring out how far he wants to push things.

9. Inherent Vice (2014)

Joaquin Phoenix plays permanently fogged-up private investigator Doc Sportello in Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel. The plot deliberately slips through your fingers, which is either the joke or the problem depending on your patience. But the grubby 1970 Los Angeles atmosphere, Josh Brolin’s wonderfully strange performance and the movie’s melancholy underneath all that marijuana smoke make it worth revisiting.

8. Licorice Pizza (2021)

A teenage actor and a directionless twenty-something run around California’s San Fernando Valley in 1973, selling waterbeds, starting businesses and making increasingly questionable decisions. Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim give the film its loose, lived-in charm. Your tolerance for the age-gap relationship will affect how warmly you take it, but Anderson’s ability to make two people simply walking through a city feel electric is fully intact.

7. The Master (2012)

You could move The Master five places higher and make a convincing case. Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell, a traumatized World War II veteran, collides with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd, and the resulting relationship never settles into something easy to explain. The film can feel chilly and elusive, but the performances are enormous without becoming simple.

6. Phantom Thread (2017)

Daniel Day-Lewis plays Reynolds Woodcock, a celebrated 1950s London dressmaker whose perfectly controlled life gets disrupted by Alma, played by Vicky Krieps. What initially looks like a stately period drama gradually reveals itself as a very funny, deeply odd romance about two people inventing relationship rules that would horrify almost everyone else. Breakfast has rarely seemed so threatening.

Where Anderson Goes From Great to Essential

5. Magnolia (1999)

At 188 minutes, Magnolia asks for your afternoon and then spends it following lonely, furious and frightened people across the San Fernando Valley. Tom Cruise’s performance as misogynistic motivational speaker Frank T.J. Mackey remains one of the boldest turns of his career, while Philip Seymour Hoffman finds enormous warmth in a much quieter role.

And yes, frogs happen. Anderson was only 29 when the film arrived, and you can feel a young filmmaker trying to put every idea he has onto the screen. Sometimes that excess is exhausting. More often, it’s exactly why the movie works.

4. One Battle After Another (2025)

Anderson’s tenth feature pushed him onto a much bigger commercial canvas. Leonardo DiCaprio leads a cast including Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and Regina Hall in a 161-minute crime thriller about former revolutionaries pulled back into conflict when an old enemy returns. It opened domestically with roughly $22 million and eventually reached approximately $213 million worldwide.

What makes it feel like Anderson rather than somebody borrowing his name for a studio production is the tension between spectacle and damaged human relationships. After decades of films that often treated commercial success as almost incidental, seeing his obsessions operate at this scale adds a genuinely new chapter to the filmography.

3. Boogie Nights (1997)

This is where Anderson announced himself. Mark Wahlberg’s Eddie Adams becomes porn star Dirk Diggler, enters a makeshift family built around Burt Reynolds’ director Jack Horner, then discovers how quickly that family can collapse.

Released in 1997, Boogie Nights moves with the swagger of somebody who has watched Scorsese repeatedly and is talented enough to survive the comparison. But the movie’s secret weapon is tenderness. Anderson cares about these people long after their confidence, money and good decisions disappear.

The Two Films That Define Him

2. Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

Adam Sandler plays Barry Egan, a lonely novelty-toilet-plunger salesman with seven sisters, explosive anger and a plan involving pudding cups and airline miles. Somehow, Anderson turns those ingredients into one of the strangest romantic comedies of the 2000s.

At around 95 minutes, it’s also his most approachable major film. Sandler’s familiar screen rage becomes something vulnerable and frightening, while Emily Watson gives Barry a reason to believe his awkward little life might expand. If somebody tells you PTA movies are too long or too serious, start them here.

1. There Will Be Blood (2007)

Daniel Plainview arrives with almost nothing and spends the next 158 minutes building an oil empire while stripping away whatever remains of his humanity. Daniel Day-Lewis won the Best Actor Oscar for the role, and his clashes with Paul Dano’s preacher Eli Sunday give Anderson the perfect arena for his recurring interests: ambition, performance, family and power.

But what keeps There Will Be Blood at number one isn’t one famous milkshake line. It’s the confidence of the whole thing, from Jonny Greenwood’s abrasive score to the near-wordless opening and that brutal final confrontation. Anderson had made bigger, busier films before. Here, every choice feels sharpened.

Why You Should Care

You don’t need to be a film-school obsessive to get something from Anderson’s movies. Pick the right entry point and you’ll find crime stories, romances, comedies and family dramas, usually powered by actors doing some of their best work.

And his career rewards bouncing around rather than watching chronologically. Go from Punch-Drunk Love to There Will Be Blood and it barely seems possible that the same director made both. Then watch Phantom Thread and realize the weirdness was there all along.

What to Watch Next

Start with Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) if Magnolia’s sprawling ensemble grabbed you, then try Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) for some of the propulsive filmmaking DNA you can feel in Boogie Nights. And if Inherent Vice left you wanting more sun-dazed paranoia, watch Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973).

The best Anderson movie depends partly on which version of Anderson you want. But There Will Be Blood is where all his competing instincts, funny, cruel, intimate and obsessive, seem to burn hottest at once.