Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro

Synopsis:

Washed-up revolutionary Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) exists in a state of stoned paranoia, surviving off-grid with his spirited, self-reliant daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). When his evil nemesis (Sean Penn) resurfaces after 16 years and she goes missing, the former radical scrambles to find her, father and daughter both battling the consequences of his past.

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Sometimes when a veteran filmmaker finally gets around to making a project that they’ve dreamed of doing for decades, the resulting film can be an overcooked mess, all that time spent inside its creator’s brain leaving it a jumble of incoherent if fascinating ideas. (A recent example that springs to mind is Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.) But there are other, rarer occasions when a long-evolving project gets exactly the time in the oven that it needed. (An example here might be George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road.)

Only after the filmmaker in question has amassed a career’s worth of experience making work across multiple genres, found enough success and acclaim within the industry to command large budgets and to work with any actor they want, and established a core team of trusted creative collaborators can they truly realize a dream that even a few years before was more like a vision board than a feasible plan.

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