On Knuckle Sandwich, the Paul Thomas Anderson movie that wasn’t.
Inherent Vice is a film that tricks us into settling in for a noir about a man solving a mystery, and instead presents us with a man confronting a melancholy truth: everything—lives, eras, and loves—comes to an end.
In Phantom Thread, the concession of loving is not an ending, nor a triumph—it is a turn of the screw.