The main thing is that The Master is so unlike anything else in its seriousness and so admirable in its vitality that one has to support it.

| Feb 25, 2019

It is all so enigmatic and underwritten I felt rather shut out. A 'challenging' film is one thing, but one that actually slams the door in your face is quite another, as well as rude.

| Sep 1, 2018

Towering standalone moments all, they are certainly impressive when first encountered, though they wobble perilously the longer one looks at them...It isn't a great film - but it has a great film rattling around inside it.

| Apr 9, 2018

At least the performances, specifically from Phoenix and Hoffman, kept you engaged enough to want to finish the rest of the movie.

| Original Score: C+ | Sep 7, 2017

It's a mess; it's pretentious; it is thundery with dismay.

| Jun 14, 2013

In the end it may not have the emotional uplift the Academy or a popular mainstream audience craves, but make no mistake, this is an enthralling drama about a peculiarly American restlessness, and the striving for insight and grace.

| Jan 8, 2013

[A] challenging, psychologically fraught drama.

| Jan 8, 2013

The Master is not short but, once you fill in the blanks, you find yourself constructing a meta-film that, if realised, would play for many, many more hours.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 15, 2012

It is an extraordinary film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Nov 8, 2012

After an hour, I was baffled. After two, I was bored stiff.

| Nov 4, 2012

This is a glorious movie, an omnivorous, many-coloured satire on the chameleon-hued carnivores of our souls.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 1, 2012

All hail the master.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 31, 2012

An often brilliant '50s-throwback character drama that never feels nostalgic, with terrific central performances and a luminous, unforgettable visual beauty.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 29, 2012

The Master is less than the sum of its parts, but, oh, what parts they are.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 28, 2012

Intelligent, chilly and fascinating, this uneven film didn't need 70 mm. It's a taut eye-to-eye war between Hoffman, magnificent as an egotist, and Phoenix, his needy follower

| Sep 22, 2012

The Master may go down as one of Paul Thomas Anderson's most compelling works for two simple reasons: Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 22, 2012

Where There Will Be Blood transmuted sullen earth into flame and launched it violently skyward, The Master is, as its opening shot advertises, a more fluid undertaking, a story of ebb and flow.

| Sep 21, 2012

The Master is as confounding as it is magnificent.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 21, 2012

The Master is nothing short of an alternate history to the bobby-socked, Panglossed Fifties, a bracing antidote to our rose-colored pictures of prosperity and suburban domesticity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 21, 2012

[Phoenix and Hoffman] suggest duelling Brandos.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 21, 2012