Is There Will Be Blood the best film of 2008?
It's not out until February, but Paul Thomas Anderson's fifth feature already looks set to be one of the highlights of next year.
Ryan Gilbey

As you look ahead to the New Year, it's always advisable to keep a cool, clear head and to resist rash predictions and hyperbole. Today's excitable speculation can turn into tomorrow's regret quicker than you can say weapons of mass destruction.

On the other hand, and in a recklessly contradictory spirit of gibbering over-reaction, let me say something about There Will Be Blood, the new movie from Paul Thomas Anderson. He is, you will recall, the prodigiously talented writer-director who, in the course of only four ambitious and increasingly risky films, has placed himself at the top of many people's Director Most Likely to Develop Into a Mad Genius list. But his fifth feature is something else - an authentic epic with insane, Kubrickian touches of caustic satire. There Will Be Blood? There Will Be Rave Reviews, Oscars And General Praising Of The Heavens, more like.

The film is an overwhelming, intense experience, as Anderson's pictures often are, but with one key difference. His 1996 debut, Hard Eight (aka Sydney) was a sinewy thriller overly indebted to David Mamet. Boogie Nights and Magnolia seemed artificially pumped-up, dependent on gargantuan structures that the writing itself wasn't mature enough to justify, while Punch Drunk Love, (the most mysterious and magical of his films before now) felt like an experiment that could spiral out of control at any moment. But There Will Be Blood represents the moment at which Anderson's material and his sense of scale are in perfect harmony: it needs to be this vast, this long (it clocks in at around 160 minutes).

It's a big film in every sense, full of yawning, hostile landscapes, and close-ups of Daniel Day-Lewis that compete with the mountains for sheer, craggy magnificence. I won't say much more about it because it doesn't open until next February, and I'd hate the shock of seeing it - pleasant or otherwise - to be diminished for you. But it's enough to mention that Paul Dano (the Nietzsche-obsessed older brother from Little Miss Sunshine) gives a goosebump-inducing performance as Eli Sunday, a budding preacher in early-20th century California, and that Day-Lewis is even fiercer and more fatally charismatic than you would expect as Daniel Plainview, the oil tycoon who lets nothing stand in the way of constructing his empire. If both men don't go home with some serious doorstops under their arms come Oscar night, something will be very wrong.

It would be foolish to call There Will Be Blood the film of 2008 when we don't yet know what that year holds; some unknown poet of cinema is, at this very moment, probably putting the finishing touches to a movie that will challenge our notions of what film can do. (We can hope.) But I don't feel it's overstating the case to say that we should be thankful Paul Thomas Anderson is around.

Not all his contemporaries have fared so well: as his near-namesake and fellow one-time saviour-of-American-cinema, Wes Anderson, releases a new film (The Darjeeling Limited) that looks prematurely clapped-out and over-the-hill, it's reassuring that not everyone suffers from Difficult Fifth Film Syndrome.