I’m not entirely sure what I think about its ending, but I will say this: There Will Be Blood doesn’t feel like a two-and-a-half-hour movie. There’s not a single moment when it seems to drag, when what’s on screen doesn’t seem absolutely essential — perhaps because Daniel Day Lewis, who is riveting in the film, is on screen nearly all the time. Nathan Rabin called it, “a fascinating anomaly—a rip-roaring two-fisted epic concerned almost exclusively with the tormented psyche and spiritual death of a single man.”
I’m sure if I’d managed to see it a week ago, it would have made my list of the best films of 2007. I can’t imagine how it won’t make my list of the best films I’ve seen in 2008.