Anderson made an aching, yearning three-hour epic about lost souls in LA’s San Fernando Valley, culminating in a nutty, biblical-level frog deluge.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 9, 2025

A fever dream of souls crashing, repentance, forgiveness and second chances. Tom Cruise is phenomenal in what could be Paul Thomas Anderson's best offering. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 28, 2025

Magnolia is an extraordinary film about ordinary lives.

| Sep 19, 2024

Magnolia is operatic in its ambition, a great, joyous leap into melodrama and coincidence, with ragged emotions, crimes and punishments, deathbed scenes, romantic dreams, generational turmoil and celestial intervention, all scored to insistent music.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 15, 2023

Anderson has dared to make a movie that refuses to conceal its excesses, an amazing abundance of strong emotion, technical verve and pure performance power.

| Original Score: A- | Jul 15, 2023

While not as fully realized as Anderson's last movie, Boogie Nights, Magnolia is filmed with the same skillful abandon, and takes many more artistic risks... The result is a movie as fascinating for its flaws as for its considerable successes.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 15, 2023

It's a film of power, substance and superlative performances that challenges audiences. Hopefully, audiences will be up to taking that challenge.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 15, 2023

Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson's frenzied follow-up to Boogie Nights, can be as intoxicating as the flower it's named for, and its characters, most of them as flawed and fascinating as the film itself, seem intoxicated by the overpowering scent.

| Jul 15, 2023

The film's structure is complicated, yet Anderson makes it look effortless. Completing the films emotional impact is the soundtrack of original songs by Aimee Mann.

| Jul 15, 2023

Magnolia is the kind of material actors cherish, with bravura passages of emotional release and dialogue crackling with despair and a hint of ironic humor.

| Original Score: A- | Jul 15, 2023

[A] sprawling, enthralling phantasmagoria.

| Jul 15, 2023

Magnolia is ambitious. Ambitious and audacious in all the right ways. When it fails or falters, and these moments are few, the shortcomings are honorable.

| Jul 15, 2023

Exhausting at times, frustrating in others, Magnolia is mostly just exhilarating, the product of a raw vibrant talent finding his footing in an adult world -- and unafraid to make mistakes.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 15, 2023

By the end, you’re likely to feel that you’ve been dragged over rugged terrain by a race car. And perhaps, like me, you’ll find yourself a week later still bruised and haunted by this feverish, harrowing, masterfully executed ensemble piece.

| Jul 15, 2023

With Magnolia, Anderson has not only created a little masterpiece that promises to resonate weeks after you see it, he has also proven himself to be one of the most important American filmmakers of our times.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 15, 2023

It's perhaps the most profoundly sobering thought in [Magnolia] that in this era of cultural fragmentation and soulless isolation, the most powerful unifying element that binds us together is the hypnotic cobalt glow of television.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 15, 2023

The dialogue in Magnolia is as impressive as the acting. Anderson has a jewel of a screenplay, and his actors don't let him down.

| Original Score: A | Jul 15, 2023

What is exhilarating is that nothing can be taken for granted.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 15, 2023

A personal drama and dark comedy of epic proportions, a visually exciting story of human emotion and cosmic circumstance. It is a compelling, innovative and sometimes brilliant work from director Paul Thomas Anderson. I just wish it were a better movie.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 14, 2023

For Cruise, Moore and William H. Macy (as an aging wunderkind), it's proof they're three of the finest actors in the business.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 14, 2023