Moviola > Films > There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood  (15)   158 mins

"When ambition meets faith."

A sprawling epic of family, faith, power and oil, the film is set on the incendiary frontier of California's turn-of-the-century petroleum boom.  The story chronicles the life and times of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) - a charismatic and ruthless oil prospector, driven to succeed by his intense hatred of others and his psychological need to see any and all competitors fail. When he learns of oil-rich land in California that can be bought cheaply, he moves his operation there.  In the hardscrabble town of Little Boston, where the main excitement centres around the Holy Roller church of charismatic preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), Plainview begins manipulating and exploiting the local landowners into selling him their property. Using his young adopted son H.W. to project the image of a caring family man, Plainview gains the cooperation of almost all the locals with lofty promises to build schools and cultivate the land to make their community flourish. But over time, conflicts escalate and every human value - love, hope, community, belief, ambition and even the bond between father and son - is imperilled by corruption, deception and the flow of oil.

There Will Be Blood won two Oscars (Best Actor - Daniel Day-Lewis and Best Achievement in Cinematography - Robert Elswit) and received six further nominations.

"This is a dark, uncompromising film, thrillingly original and distinctive, with a visionary passion. It is a movie against which all directors, and all moviegoers, will want to measure themselves. Paul Thomas Anderson is doing something new with cinema, and you can hardly ask for more than that."  Peter Bradshaw

"A gripping saga of obsession, corruption and greed topped off with an audacious finale that more than delivers on the movie's doom-laden title. Hypnotic, poetic and often downright strange, the remarkable result is every bit as combustible as the black stuff itself."  BBC Movies

"This is a force 10 gale of a performance from Day-Lewis, muscular, visceral, venomous and restrained all at once." Urban Cinefile

www.paramountvantage.com/blood/

Showing:

04-June        Petersfield

12-June        Kings Somborne

12-June        Sturminster Newton       

29-June        Urchfont  

04-July         Overton     

Last modified: 07-Apr-2008

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