Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film is one of the defining American works of the century. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, an oil prospector at the turn of the twentieth century, in a performance widely regarded as among the finest of his career. Anderson works in the tradition of Kubrick and Malick, but the vision is his own. Jonny Greenwood's score is central to the film's architecture rather than incidental to it. A study of ambition, faith, and the American landscape, and a landmark in Anderson's filmography.

Krzysztof Kieślowski's 1993 film, the first of his Trois Couleurs trilogy, remains one of the great works of European cinema. Coming back to Kieślowski's Bleu expecting to admire it again, instead it caught me off guard, the way it did the first time. Juliette Binoche, as Julie, moves through the early scenes almost vacantly, and the film moves with her. Grief here isn't dramatized. It's the weather. Preisner's score keeps surfacing like a thought she can't finish, and by the time it finally resolves, something in you has resolved too. I'm not sure liberty has been filmed more honestly since. The first of the trilogy, and still, for me, the one that matters most.

Christopher Nolan builds a heist inside a dream, and then inside more dreams below it. The film runs almost two and a half hours and never slows down. Each scene answers a question the previous one raised, so the pace holds all the way through. The filmmaking is technically smart without showing off. Nolan builds for real where he can and uses effects to serve the story, never to replace it. The rules of the dream world are explained once, clearly, and then the film gets on with it. The script gives Leonardo DiCaprio the toughest acting job. The other characters each have one function, but his Cobb carries the most layers and the most conflict, and several scenes ask him to play more than one emotion at once. He handles it excellently, and the film leans on that: without him the machinery would be all there is.