This latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson sees the director reuniting with Daniel Day-Lewis for his final film performance. Love London Love Culture rounds up the reviews here.
The Guardian: ***** “Day-Lewis gives a performance of almost ridiculously charismatic outrageousness, the sort only he could get away with.”
The Independent: **** “The pleasure here lies in the unpredictability of Paul Thomas Anderson’s approach, his ability and that of his actors to surprise us with every new stitch of the movie.”
Independent.ie: ***** “a lush, grand, compelling drama set in the stultifying world of 1950s London fashion.”
Herald Scotland: “With fabulous costume and production design, and a beautiful, subtle score by Anderson’s regular composer Jonny Greenwood, the result is quite exquisite and – like every Anderson film, from Boogie Nights to Inherent Vice – inimitable.”
Empire: **** “for all its messed-up-family familiarity, it does feel like a major change for the director, into a fresh setting and genre that suit him well.”
Evening Standard: ****** “Day-Lewis is sublime as a fragile, difficult, quixotic, neurotic perfectionist artist.”
BFI: “The tension between Anderson’s wicked sense of humour and his immaculate craftsmanship – the latter placed in even sharper relief by scenes depicting Reynolds’s own meticulous process, legible but not underlined as an allegory for filmmaking – is potent stuff.”
NME: **** “Deeply visual and intensely detailed, this is a film for art lovers. Director Paul Thomas Anderson has made a career out of crafting rich worlds and Phantom Thread is no different.”
The Times: **** “During a lifetime of film watching, and 24 years of professional film criticism, I’ve never once encountered one that I have loved and loathed with the same amount of passion. Until now. The film is Phantom Thread.”
Irish Times: **** “Paul Thomas Anderson ’s sly oddness is all his own. Heck, the thing is nearly a comedy.”
The Metro: ***** “Featuring career-best work from everyone involved, Phantom Thread is cinema couture.”
City AM: ***** ” Day-Lewis is an utter joy. His Woodcock is a Freudian monstrosity, so cutting and bitchy that in lesser hands – perhaps in any other hands – he would be a pantomime villain.”
The Mirror: ***** “Anderson fashions a world of stylish fetish and embroiders it in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock.”
Radio Times: ***** “divine, poetically scripted and unpredictable melodrama examines the impact of emotional upheaval on the fragile mind of a finely tuned creative.”
Phantom Thread is in cinemas now.