There's something so captivating about the way Daniel Plainview speaks. About how his silver-quoted tongue leads words of wisdom and words of wickedness out onto a merry dance. About that John Huston style drawl. About the complete clarity and self-assured majesty he bestows upon his persuasive sentences.

You want to believe Daniel Plainview, and you root for him. Even though he makes every possibly moral compromise you can think of on his way to becoming one of the biggest oilmen in America.

And you root also for Daniel Day-Lewis, who portrays Plainview in what is easily one of the finest performances in the history of cinema. The lines between the real Daniel and the fictional Daniel blur very early on, and ten minutes into the film you'd be hardpressed to remember Day-Lewis or the rest of his oeuvre. It's all Plainview, and he's the kind of spider it's very hard to look away from -- even if you're dying to flinch.

Based very loosely on Upton Sinclair's Oil, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is an outright masterpiece. Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood haunts us with a magnificently atypical background score, while Robert Elswit's cinematography is the stuff of magic. Yet this is a film centring on the protagonist's performance, and what an astonishing performance it is.

Plainview isn't the only moral compass in the film. There Will Be Blood sees him pitted against evangelist Eli Sunday, played very compellingly by Paul Dano. Both men tread muddily through immorality, and their confrontation is best explored in this disturbing, brilliant scene about faith healing, one that you must watch now. I can't possibly do it the injustice of describing it.

A magnum opus from a director who has always dabbled in greatness.

Also Read: The Oscar Review

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