Paul Thomas Anderson
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Weapons (2025)
Directed by Zach Cregger
influenced Magnolia (1999), One Battle After Another (2025), Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Themes Visuals
Like Eddington, Friendship, and Weapons, One Battle After Another is one of the best movies of the year because it so deftly diagnoses America…
The homages are obvious, especially regarding What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Magnolia, and The Shining.
Cregger has cited Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia as an influence…
“Weapons” moves with such an off-kilter gait that “Punch-Drunk Love” seems like the more relevant PTA film. Its plunky score, its percussive energy, its open-hearted characters in desperate search for a vessel to contain their emotions…
Amy Madigan (Weapons)…
Much like Zach Cregger’s Weapons, One Battle After Another has its plot, character development, and tension weaving together flawlessly while the movie stays in near-constant motion.
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Directed by Joel Coen
influenced One Battle After Another (2025), Inherent Vice (2014), Licorice Pizza (2021), There Will Be Blood (2007)
Themes Characters
What it does do, however, is answer the question: “What if we gave one of the most talented filmmakers out there a blockbuster-sized budget and let him shoot the absolute shit out of The Big Lebowski-meets-Mission: Impossible?”
…the movie is like if Taken and The Big Lebowski had a baby…
…the fact that he plays most of the back half in a bathrobe makes Big Lebowski comparisons somewhat inevitable, as does the uproarious scene (featured in the trailers) when he attempts to make contact with his handlers, and cannot remember the damn passwords and spycraft in the slightest.
Pat/Bob plays like a variation of “The Dude” from The Big Lebowski (1998)…
It’s hilarious to see DiCaprio work his own twist on the stoner Jeff Bridges immortalized as the Dude in “The Big Lebowski.”
DiCaprio channels “The Big Lebowski’s” shambolic Dude. From his ever-present bathrobe and slightly bewildered facial expressions to his loyalty to friends and family and resilience the star’s take on Bob is a fun and funny homage to Jeff Bridges’s iconic performance.
The Long Goodbye (1973)
Directed by Robert Altman
influenced Inherent Vice (2014), Licorice Pizza (2021), Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Visuals Plot Themes Characters
The sprawling, pinwheeling world that surrounds Alana and Gary as they barrel around the Valley making sometimes regrettable choices recalls, in particular, the prismatic early-’70s L.A. of Altman’s The Long Goodbye , a place full of larger-than-life characters and enigmatic encounters.
Soon, you’re just placed under a hazy, romantic spell of all the sincere, heartfelt, and very loose vibing (sometimes it feels like it features the rich, idling, and consorting languidness of Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” minus the detective story).
Not only does it continue Anderson’s impossible-to-predict genre shifting, but it feels like a particularly heightened variation on Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), which had the radical notion of planting Raymond Chandler’s hardened private dick Philip Marlowe smack in the middle of Southern California hippie culture and having Elliott Gould play him as a languid dolt (one of ’70s Hollywood’s most memorable deconstructions of heroism).
The slow disgust, the moral apathy, the hippie princesses and the louts who victimized them — it was all there first in "The Long Goodbye."
Joaquin Phoenix resists the urge to take the easy way out and plays Doc not as Shaggy from "Scooby-Doo" but as a sadder, scruffier Philip Marlowe from Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye," the movie Anderson uses as a touchstone.
It’s already a cliché to describe the film as a combination of the Coen brothers’ “The Big Lebowski” and Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” and while that doesn’t capture everything it’s close enough to be irresistible.
But here, influenced heavily by the haunting suspense of Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” an older Anderson dramatizes the other side of love.
The film, which Anderson, in an interview with the New York Times , likened to gothic romances like Rebecca, Vertigo, and Gaslight, is as much about female frustration as it is about the spark of creativity.
When the second Mrs de Winter questions her husband and home in Rebecca, her fear and insecurity, as well as her love and longing, were real, deeply, sensitively understood.
Beyond the dazzling performances of Daniel Day-Lewis, Vicky Krieps, and Lesley Manville; the swooping and/or oddly angled luminous 35-mm cinematography by Anderson himself; and the almost omnipresent orchestral score by Jonny Greenwood, which suggests Nelson Riddle on ecstasy, the movie’s uniqueness is its fluidly shifting tone, as if the ghosts of genres as diverse as gothic mysteries (Hitchcock’s Rebecca), screwball comedies (Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby), perverse, obsessional romances (Kubrick’s Lolita), and Angela Carter’s feminist inversions of classic fairy tales were dancing at the edge of the collective consciousness of everyone involved, including the viewer.
She’s like the housekeeper in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” creepy and a touch macabre, always hovering, except that the great Lesley Manville, her eyes like black lasers, her hair piled into a short stacked ‘do, plays her like the Judi Dench version of a John Waters character: a badass in dowager’s clothing.
With echoes of everything from “The Shining” to “Psycho” to “Boogie Nights” to “Alligator” to “Hardcore” to infamous porn films such as “Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie” and “Debbie Does Dallas,” this is an homage but also a strikingly original and cheerfully grotesque work, filled with dark humor, relatively complex subtext and gung-ho, all-in performances from the talented ensemble cast.
He also evokes other major horrors — especially Psycho and Hooper’s Chain Saw follow-up, Death Trap , aka Eaten Alive — to build background dread while the main characters think they’re in a comical, down-home Boogie Nights .
We see several of the porn scenes being shot, and like the ones in “Boogie Nights” they’re realistic and true to the scruffy pre-video porn vibe.
The introduction of the eerie farm environment is lifted straight from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” while the porn actors aspiring to be famous have the spirit of “Boogie Nights.”
While Mia Goth plays double duty as both Maxine and Howard’s wife Pearl, Brittany Snow’s performance wholly embraces this nostalgic take on what a porn actress from the late 1970s should feel like, reminiscent of Heather Graham in Boogie Nights.
Snow and Mescudi bring a heart and humor to these scenes that evoke Boogie Nights .
Babylon (2022)
Directed by Damien Chazelle
influenced by Boogie Nights (1997), There Will Be Blood (2007), Magnolia (1999)
Plot Visuals Themes
The camera enters the movie’s opening party on a sinuous, elaborately choreographed long take (the first of several such shots) that’s a conscious homage to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights —another movie about a dying industry that’s structured around a series of increasingly sordid parties.
Toward the end, an on-set drug dealer who calls himself “The Count” (Rory Scovel) gets Manny in a fix with a strung-out gangster (Tobey Maguire in a most unsettling cameo) — a rip-off of the Alfred Molina/Wonderland sequence in “Boogie Nights,” until it takes a deranged turn that suggests the “Gimp” scene from “Pulp Fiction.”
Unabashedly borrowing from the likes of Martin Scorsese (pilfering the exaggerated dark comedic streak of The Wolf of Wall Street , Margot Robbie not being the only member of that cast present) and Paul Thomas Anderson (carbon-copying full ideas from Boogie Nights , another look at a corner of the film industry fighting for legitimization) with unfettered abandon, Chazelle may still be searching for an original voice, but his primary goal is to entertain.
A sequence depicting how hard it was to shoot with sound was done better and in significantly less screen time in Singing in the Rain , and the final violent act feels like a copycat version of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Long Way Down (One Last Thing)” sequence from Boogie Nights .
And we haven’t even gotten to Babylon’s sex-dungeon territory, in which Chazelle appears to lovingly rip-off Boogie Nights’ infamous late-film robbery scene, except that this time Alfred Molina is swapped for a bug-eyed Tobey Maguire, firecrackers are replaced by hacking spittle, and, also, there’s a dude who eats rats.
The tepid response to "First Man?" Whatever it was, his grand tribute to the early days of Hollywood is equal parts "Boogie Nights" and "Apocalypse Now," and it will be interesting to see where he goes from here, since "Babylon" very much feels like an End of the World party, a clearance sale where nothing gets left behind.
Shampoo (1975)
Directed by Hal Ashby
influenced Licorice Pizza (2021), Phantom Thread (2017)
Characters Visuals
Delivering a waterbed to a fancy address, they encounter Jon Peters (a hilariously committed Bradley Cooper), the real-life celebrity hairstylist and legendary womanizer who is said to have been the inspiration for Warren Beatty’s character in Shampoo .
* – Probably not coincidentally, George Roundy, the playboy hairdresser played by Warren Beatty in Shampoo, was partially modeled after Jon Peters.
Gary and Alana eventually start a waterbed business and deliver one to a volatile, lascivious Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), the movie producer, boyfriend of Barbra Streisand, and suspected inspiration for Warren Beatty’s character in Shampoo .
The film’s ultimate example of this is the brilliant set piece involving Gary and Alana delivering a waterbed to Hollywood producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper, playing the real-life womanizer who inspired Warren Beatty’s character in Shampoo), who also happened to be Barbra Streisand’s boyfriend at the time.
Some of those stories are told here, few of them more arresting than the one starring a hilarious, unnerving Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters, the prolific producer and serial womanizer (and frequent sexual-harassment defendant) whose early career as a hairdresser was one of the inspirations for Ashby’s great 1975 comedy, “Shampoo.”
But the more obvious influences are works from auteurs Hal Ashby (“Shampoo”) and Robert Altman (“Short Cuts,” “The Player”), as Anderson once again demonstrates his genius for pitch-perfect ensemble casting and an uncanny ability to weave multiple ongoing storylines into a cohesive, exhilarating, astonishingly authentic big-picture story.
Chinatown (1974)
Directed by Roman Polanski
influenced Inherent Vice (2014), There Will Be Blood (2007)
Themes Characters Plot
He references other films--CHINATOWN and CITIZEN KANE most notably--yet this too is a way of showing the timelessness of the examined themes.
His performance has lead to comparisons with John Huston (probably most famous these days for his turn in Chinatown), but in a way it's more reminiscent of De Niro's violent boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull.
Normally an exceptional performer, Day-Lewis has opted, either through Anderson's direction or of his own accord, to channel John Huston -- and probably Noah Cross in Chinatown -- into his character, speaking with the same educated, growling, snakeskin drawl.
But Anderson overreaches in the movie's lengthy epilogue set in 1927, which seems loosely inspired by "Chinatown."
In Roman Polanski’s Chinatown , detective Jake Gittes became suspicious of a devious California millionaire named Noah Cross, played by the great John Huston.
But Day-Lewis, who seems to have modeled his courtly-demonic vocal drawl here on John Huston's Noah Cross in "Chinatown," is one of the few actors who can infuse a symbolic character with the lifeblood of passionate, lived-in experience.
Citizen Kane (1941)
Directed by Orson Welles
influenced There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012), Licorice Pizza (2021), Boogie Nights (1997)
Themes Visuals
We're variously reminded of Greed, Citizen Kane, Days of Heaven, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and even Werner Herzog's oil-fire documentary, Lessons of Darkness — all better movies on similar themes.
Then again, Day-Lewis' oversized turn is right in line with Paul Thomas Anderson's oversized ambitions in creating a modern-day masterpiece, a movie so audacious that it flagrantly apes Citizen Kane during its final half-hour and recalls The Treasure of the Sierra Madre at regular intervals.
He references other films--CHINATOWN and CITIZEN KANE most notably--yet this too is a way of showing the timelessness of the examined themes.
Altman’s contributions to modern filmmaking, especially of the American independent type, are so vast and so liberating that it would be almost as limiting for a serious young American director to try to avoid them as it would have been for a silent filmmaker to work without reference to D. W. Griffith or a studio director of the ’40s and ’50s to avoid referencing Citizen Kane.
It evokes passing comparisons to everything from "Giant" to "Citizen Kane" but it's impossible to pigeonhole.
Plainview's only goal in life is to become enormously wealthy, and he does so, reminding me of " Citizen Kane " and Mr. Bernstein's observation, "It's easy to make a lot of money, if that's all you want to do is make a lot of money."
Vertigo (1958)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
influenced Phantom Thread (2017), One Battle After Another (2025)
Visuals Themes Plot
Vertigo's vertiginous rooftop chase must have inspired the scene…
The film, which Anderson, in an interview with the New York Times , likened to gothic romances like Rebecca, Vertigo, and Gaslight, is as much about female frustration as it is about the spark of creativity.
When Scotty in Vertigo becomes fixated on Judy, his grief, obsession, control, and desire are terrifying, but honest.
Phantom Thread is essentially a smart-ass retort to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), repeating Hitchcock’s basic plot of a psychotic male making over a common girl (James Stewart selfishly “correcting” Kim Novak) into his erotic ideal.
He courts Alma by using her as a human mannequin, and it’s therefore hard not to get intimations of a movie like “Vertigo,” or maybe a super-kinky “Pygmalion.”
Her name is suggestive, not only because it is Spanish for “soul” but also because it belonged to the wife and close collaborator of Alfred Hitchcock, whose first American project, the 1940 gothic romance Rebecca, Anderson has cited, along with the supremely fetishistic Vertigo, as a point of reference for this film.
American Graffiti (1973)
Directed by George Lucas
influenced Licorice Pizza (2021), Boogie Nights (1997)
Music Themes
The omnipresent soundtrack– Nights is a combination of American Graffiti (the prolific use of songs), Goodfellas (the way music is used to move a scene) and Saturday Night Fever (the general feel of the first hour… and look for the Staying Alive reference in the film’s second half)–the soundtrack draws so much attention to the way the film looks, it’s almost like Anderson is telling the viewer the story doesn’t matter too much.
Not only casting unknowns, but virtually untested, actors Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman (son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) in the leads and setting it all in 1973 (the same year American Graffiti opened, a stated inspiration for Anderson), the director has rolled the dice on a story that is loosely based on the youthful experiences of producer Gary Goetzman.
What’s here is a wistful coming-of-age saga akin to George Lucas’ “American Graffiti” (made the same year “Pizza” takes place) without the anxiety and anger and soaring on the chemistry and charisma of Haim and Hoffman, the haute idiosyncrasies of the (eve of Watergate) era and a soundtrack that just can’t be beat.
Although it channels Fast Times At Ridgemont High and American Graffiti , Licorice Pizza delivers a fresh blast of romance and humour, and feels idiosyncratic enough to stand gloriously apart.
It’s a bit shaggy and baggy at first, but once you get on its wavelength—seeing it as a kind of doobie-esque Hal Ashby/Altman-like hang out movie with “American Graffiti” night-on-the-town coming of age vibes—and once it all coalesces—warm, affectionate, nostalgic— it’s a real terrific throwback thrill of captivating, unique characters in a simple, unpretentious story about running around and growing up in 1970s Los Angeles with little tentative romance sprinkled in for good measure.
Some of it was inspired by classics like “American Graffiti,” with its burger-joints-and-cherry-bombs vision of California youth, or plucked from real-life events, like the ’70s gas shortages that caused car lines to stretch on for blocks.
The Nice Guys (2016)
Directed by Shane Black
influenced by Boogie Nights (1997), Inherent Vice (2014)
Visuals Themes Plot
These accomplished dramatic thespians fully buy into the deadpan style tinged with a funky aesthetic, in which brutal beatings mesh seamlessly with pratfalls, and tributes to Abbott & Costello comfortably reside along sequences that might have felt at home in “Boogie Nights.”
In “The Nice Guys” we’re hanging out in Los Angeles circa 1977 where the neon buzz of “Boogie Nights” is everywhere and the veins of corruption, akin to “L.A. Confidential” and “Chinatown,” run deep.
And Black gleefully sets the film in 1978, in a "Boogie Nights" world of smoggy skies, happy pornographers and a crunchy-granola California still full of flakes and nuts.
So is the typography of the opening credits: soft curves and candy stripes, as seen in “Boogie Nights” (1997).
Still, as stand-alone capers go, this scattershot sampling of Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard, with a dash of Paul Thomas Anderson's “Boogie Nights” and “Inherent Vice,” is not without its pleasures.
Black has no interest in reinventing the buddy-cop movie, or even the ’70s private-eye mystery; he’s not trying to replicate what Paul Thomas Anderson did in Inherent Vice.
Dazed and Confused (1993)
Directed by Richard Linklater
influenced Licorice Pizza (2021)
Visuals Themes Dialogue
For the most part, Anderson channels Richard Linklater's vibe and tone in Slackers and Dazed and Confused.
There’s also the incredible soundtrack, the beauty of seeing it in 70 mm, and Anderson’s script reminiscent of teenage classics like Dazed and Confused , Empire Records , and The Last American Virgin .
While there are certainly echoes of other teen films, Dazed and Confused and The Last American Virgin come to mind, Licorice Pizza is its own thing because only Paul Thomas Anderson can tell this story in this way.
It reminded me of Dazed and Confused but without Linklater’s snappy dialogue.
It’s nothing against the instinct, I get it, I love Dazed and Confused too.
Much like another fine ‘70s nostalgia piece, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused , the pleasing texture of Licorice Pizza masks the emotional turbulence under the surface.
The Running Man (2025)
Directed by Edgar Wright
influenced by One Battle After Another (2025)
Themes
I think the film is getting at something not dissimilar to films this year like One Battle After Another, or even Superman.
…but like One Battle After Another or Andor, the heroes of 2025 are most certainly card-carrying revolutionaries…
…a neat companion to the recent One Battle After Another, with a revolutionary spirit coursing through its veins.
…even if it can feel like the safer, focus-grouped cousin of One Battle After Another.
…la siento más cercana a Una batalla tras otra (One Battle After Another, 2025), de Paul Thomas Anderson…
One Battle After Another was inarguably received as an accurate survey of the moment…
Anderson also admitted that he gave up trying to make sense, using Howard Hawks and Jules Furthman's famous Philip Marlowe movie "The Big Sleep" as his touchstone.
Later, when discussing the very elaborate and oft-discombobulating plot, Anderson referenced the film-noir classic The Big Sleep (1946) as an indecipherable influence.
Watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s wonderfully textured and intricate LA-set Inherent Vice, you are easily reminded of the famous story about Howard Hawks’ version of The Big Sleep (1946).
Drifting in the netherworld between The Big Sleep and The Big Lebowski (with Altman’s The Long Goodbye providing significant spiritual guidance), Inherent Vice does an extraordinary job of translating Pynchon’s prose to the screen; for all its free-fall feel and apparently scattershot structure, Anderson’s Oscar-nominated screenplay (which lifts much of its dialogue directly from the book) and open-hearted direction effectively distil the author’s distinctive literary aesthetic, even when occasionally diverging from the source material.
The film, which takes place in 1970, follows stoner, sandal-clad private detective Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) as he becomes further and further enmeshed in a mystery that makes Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep — or Howard Hawks’ even more impenetrable 1946 film of that novel — look positively straightforward.
During the production of 1946's The Big Sleep , director Howard Hawks and his screenwriters found themselves with an unanswered question about the murder plot that drove the Bogart-Bacall film: Who'd killed the chauffeur?
American Hustle (2013)
Directed by David O. Russell
influenced by Boogie Nights (1997), One Battle After Another (2025), Inherent Vice (2014)
Music Visuals
…the needledrops (Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” served “American Hustle” more astutely)…
Call it a rip-off or call it an homage, but let’s call it what it is: Goodfellas and Casino cut with Donnie Brasco ’s bromance and Boogie Nights ’ ’70s fetishism.
Reminiscent of the panoramic sweep of Scorsese epics like Goodfellas and Casino (with a dash of Paul Thomas Anderson’s equally ’70s-retro Boogie Nights thrown in as well), American Hustle incorporates occasional voiceover and familiar period-specific song choices on the soundtrack to evoke an era but also give a grandness to the story.
The true story is bizarre enough, yet it's clear from the outset that director David O Russell's primary touchstones are cinematic, most notably, Scorsese's Goodfellas as seen through the refractive prism of Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights , with a smidgen of Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco sprinkled in as seasoning.
The vicarious enjoyment of being bad that American Hustle provides gives it a vague kinship with Goodfellas , while its buoyant narrative energy and disco-era setting recall Boogie Nights .
When the film ventures off into back stories and character origins, it plays like a parody of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights , lacking any emotional connection.
We're variously reminded of Greed, Citizen Kane, Days of Heaven, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and even Werner Herzog's oil-fire documentary, Lessons of Darkness — all better movies on similar themes.
Based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! the movie opens with an excellent 12-minute sequence with no dialogue -- perhaps a nod to Erich von Stroheim's silent milestone, Greed, also about the destructive power of accumulated wealth?
His films aren’t really like anyone else’s, though in the case of his latest, There Will Be Blood, there are certainly strong intimations of at least three other movies—Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1923), Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974).
By depositing such a complex emotional drywell of a man in the absurd luxury of a manor house with its own bowling alley and then leaving him there to molder and unlatch, Anderson creates an indictment of the American success ethic so detailed and yet so centered on the personal and psychological that the nearest point of comparison is probably Citizen Kane or even Greed .
Mr. Anderson's epic fable about the American Dream begs comparison with other great American classics "Greed," "Chinatown," and even "Citizen Kane," though perhaps it's not of the same overall merit in spitting out its allegoryâ??as it gets bogged down too much in covering its misogynist main characters, who are used to serve a schematic political purpose.
Giant (1956)
Directed by George Stevens
influenced There Will Be Blood (2007), Phantom Thread (2017)
Themes Visuals
Inspired by Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel 'Oil!' and Margaret Leslie Davis' biography of the oil tycoon Edward Dehaney 'The Dark Side of Fortune', and shot in the same place (Marfa, Texas) where oil saga Giant was filmed in 1956, There Will Be Blood taps into a deep seam of American ideology and iconography.
There are also echoes of the 1956 James Dean classic, Giant.
Clocking in a a bursting 158 minutes, the latest Paul Thomas Anderson epic comes onto the scene reminding viewers more of the 1956 George Stevens opus "Giant" than anything else in recent or past memory.
Those who remember the 1956 James Dean classic "Giant" will notice hints and whispers from that epic in the crude-soaked new film.
Their travels are determined by Daniel’s brutal speculations, from Texas to California (the film was shot in Marfa, Texas, same location as George Stevens’ Giant, another epic melodrama about land, oil, and blood, though its CA setting suggests Anderson’s abiding interest in the state’s entwining commercial histories).
It was shot in Marfa, Texas, the location of George Stevens’$2 1956 oil epic Giant .
(*cough* Eddington cough*) Instead of emphasizing, "Hey, everything sucks now,"…
Like Eddington, Friendship, and Weapons, One Battle After Another is one of the best movies of the year because it so deftly diagnoses America…
Earlier this year, Ari Aster’s equally timely Eddington focused on how flawed both sides of the American aisle can be.
It succeeds in obtaining thematic symmetry with its focus on political extremism, whereas someone like Ari Aster nearly obtains it but falls a little short in his recent film Eddington (2025)—a cinematic retrospective of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet when Ari Aster attempted it earlier this year with Eddington, a dark political comedy about a town gone mad during the COVID-19 epidemic, it felt at times like staring directly into the sun, feeling so blinding (and unpleasant) that any perspective was hard to come by.
Like Eddington, One Battle After Another is the work of someone so comfortable in their bubble that it believes a generalized fart in all directions is an effective form of satire.
Paul Thomas Anderson was inspired by John Huston's 1946 documentary "Let There Be Light," a black and white film about WWII veterans undergoing psychiatric treatment and it is included here.
Audio English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround SubtitlesEnglish, Spanish Supplements “Back Beyond” outtakes and additional scenes “Unguided Message” behind-the-scenes featurette Teasers and trailers Let There Be Light (1946) documentary DistributorAnchor Bay Home Entertainment SRP$39.99 Release DateFebruary 26, 2012 VIDEO & AUDIO The Master looks superb on Blu-Ray.
Freddie has come out of the Navy, and the battles of the Pacific theater, "a neuro-psychiatric casualty" - a term from John Huston's postwar documentary Let There Be Light, about the rehabilitation of traumatized returning veterans, that Anderson has borrowed heavily from for his film.
Anderson took many of his cues from John Huston’s 1945 government documentary Let There Be Light, which explored trauma and depression in soldiers after combat.
Time has vindicated Huston's viewpoints: in addition to Let There Be Light serving as one inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, both Let There Be Light and "San Pietro" were selected for the National Film Registry, for their importance to national history and cinema history.