Paul Thomas Anderson movies, ranked by how much they make you cry in the shower
Paul Thomas Anderson, aka Mr. Maya Rudolph, makes movies like he’s trying to dig every feeling out of your brain. No director makes existential dread and emotional collapse look so damn cool.
Friends, if you haven’t cried in the shower after a PTA film, do you even like cinema?
This list is as unstable as Daniel Plainview and Dirk Diggler on a 24-hour bender through space-time continuums. For funsies, we’ll start with the most mellow and then work our way down until your brain’s a certified emotional dumpster fire of pain.
Enjoy. Be devastated. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
10. Junun
This is a chill music documentary, so there aren’t any screaming men. Just Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead and other insanely talented musicians vibing in a 15th century Indian fort. The most jarring, violent thing is someone playing the trumpet too passionately. I say this as a massive Streetlight Manifesto fan.
Out of all PTA’s movies, this one feels like the calm eye in a hurricane.
Shower Cry Level: No tears, just gentle swaying while sitar music plays and you thank the universe for another day earthside. NamaSLAY.
Emotional Wreckage: Peaceful, musical, suspiciously healthy. Junun is your buddy who shotgunned Four Lokos and lived on Crunchwrap Supremes, now suddenly getting interested in wellness. Good for you Melissa, but also, let’s back the fuck up and rewind…
9. Inherent Vice
Imagine watching The Big Lebowski on acid in a bathtub while someone reads Thomas Pynchon to you at gunpoint. Maybe the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson is pissed that you stole his last Nutrigrain bar. Someone has one of those clear-bodied landline phones from the ‘90s, but the ring sounds like the Barney and Friends theme song. That’s Inherent Vice.
Joaquin Phoenix plays a detective who solves and remembers nothing. He might actually be a hallucination of himself. Nothing makes sense, and that’s the entire point. This film is a fever dream where time and narrative continuity get violently murdered and chopped into little pieces.
Shower Cry Level: Staring blankly while the water hits your third eye, man. You’ll slide down the tile in resin-coated confusion soon. Don’t worry, just let it happen.
Emotional Wreckage: Psychedelic, a bit paranoid, aggressively incoherent. Nothing is understandable and it doesn’t need to be.
8. Hard Eight
PTA’s first film is like watching a slow-motion poker game where every player is haunted and no one wins anything. Just add a little more guilt. Philip Baker Hall plays a mysterious old man who might’ve actually shot a man in Reno. You also get to see an absolutely fab pre-GOOP Gwyneth Paltrow in the ol’ Chapel of Impulsive Decisions.
Hard Eight is a film noir if the crimes weren’t solved and everyone just went home and cried. This is more of a mood piece dedicated to the neon hallucination that is Nevada, but hey it has an impact.
Shower Cry Level: Sitting fully clothed in a bathtub, just existing and reflecting on your own poor life choices.
Emotional Wreckage: Quiet doom, slot-machine melancholy, paternal dread.
7. Licorice Pizza
This movie feels like a wonderful sun-drenched memory from your past that’s super duper illegal in retrospect. It’s a weirdly sweet, problematic rom-com about a 15-year-old boy seducing a 25-year-old woman. Somehow, it’s not a felony but a vibe? I won’t try to logic this one out.
Alana Haim carries this film on her chaotic, gorgeous back. Bradley Cooper shows up as a coked-up dude who tries to murder a truck. Imagine your best summer memories, but scramble them up and lie squarely in the gray. Youth is wasted on the young!
Shower Cry Level: One single tear, then you giggle and go buy a waterbed. Nice.
Emotional Wreckage: Nostalgia, moral confusion, thinking that growing up is a scam to sell greeting cards and the “good” dishes.
6. Punch-Drunk Love
OK so, Punk-Drunk Love feels like having a panic disorder AND falling in love at the same time. Been there, buddy, just mainlining euphoria with a side of spicy nihilism. Adam Sandler is intensely great here, as if his Happy GIlmore rage was put into a pressure cooker and turned into fine art. He yells, cries, punches drywall, and falls in love with Emily Watson, who looks like she was born inside a poem.
There’s a harmonium, a pudding-based scam, and Philip Seymour Hoffman cursing like he’s in an R-rated episode of Antiques Roadshow. RIP, king.
Honestly, a perfect film. No notes.
Shower Cry Score: Standing upright somehow, weeping silently while the water turns cold but somehow, you’re gonna be OK. Maybe someday.
Emotional Wreckage: Tender, twitchy, kinda dangerous.
5. Phantom Thread
The most delicate bastard you’ve ever seen (Daniel Day-Lewis, amazing as always) designs dresses, insults with surgical precision, and loses his mind if you butter toast too loudly. Enter Luxembourg’s best, Vicky Krieps, as a waitress with the emotional intelligence of a landmine. Here, the classic artist/muse dynamic goes wheels-off and they fall in love with the finesse of a wrecking ball in a ceramics workshop. Toxic codependency but make it *fashion*.
It’s romantic if you’re insane. Which, by the way, you are now.
Shower Cry Level: Staring coldly at the wall, whispering, “kiss me, my dear, before I’m sick” while thinking too hard about omelettes.
Emotional Wreckage: Beautiful dresses, power, poison, breakfast-based warfare.
4. Boogie Nights
Sometimes, a family is a bunch of porn industry colleagues who proceed to wreck everything to hell with drugs and ambition. Dirk Diggler, everyone’s favorite tragic himbo with a prosthetic penis, doubles as a metaphor for everything. Burt Reynolds’ mustache contains ancient secrets. Alfred Molina does that scene. A roller skating motif exists for tragedy and also whimsy.
You’ll laugh, cry, panic, and maybe even try doing coke off your phone screen.
Shower Cry Level: Drunk crying and dancing under the running water… and then crying even harder. You can’t go back home because you’ll never be clean again, not really.
Emotional Wreckage Score: Glitter-coated dread, disco PTSD, found family values but make it X-rated.
3. Magnolia
Ah yes, The Avengers for damaged people! Every single character experiences a simultaneous breakdown and somehow, it’s capital-A Art. Tom Cruise’s emotional climax is so impactful that I *briefly* forgave him for Scientology. Julianne Moore screams in a pharmacy, frogs fall from the sky, and at some point you’re convinced the universe wants you dead for ALL THE REASONS.
Magnolia doesn’t end. Oh, sweetie, no. It lingers. Proceed with caution.
Shower Cry Level: Shaking, scrubbing yourself raw, mouthing, “This happens. This is something that happens.”
Emotional Wreckage: Uncut trauma dump set to the sweet sounds of national treasure Aimee Mann.
2. There Will Be Blood
In this capitalist horror show, Daniel Day-Lewis plays a man who looks at the American dream and says, “I’m gonna beat you to death with a monkey wrench.” He hates people, God, milkshakes, and especially YOU, you sick bastard.
This is Shakespeare with pickaxes, people. It’s so good you’ll forget you’re rooting for Business Daddy Gone Wild.
Shower Cry Level: Not crying exactly, just screaming, “I’ve abandoned my boyyyyyyy!” to the drain. You sit there like a person who just committed moral manslaughter, congrats.
Emotional Wreckage: Cursed Americana, entrepreneurial psychosis, primal screams thrown in as a treat.
1. The Master
This movie is what happens when two deeply troubled men look into each other’s souls and see nothing but barbed wire and unresolved yearning. Strap in for an emotional waterboarding sesh.
Joaquin Phoenix moves like a raccoon possessed by a French philosopher, while Philip Seymour Hoffman runs a cult kinda like LRH. Amy Adams could baptize your soul with one look and do things with her hands that are illegal in South Dakota. You think it’s about faith. Maybe grief or war. The fine line between biological sexuality and straight-up horniness? Is it a love story?
Whatever you think The Master is about, you’re goddamn correct.
Shower Cry Level: Full fetal position under scalding hot water.
Emotional Wreckage: Horny, feral, academically wrecked.