Best of the Decade #10: There Will Be Blood

The blustery banalities and sweeping assertions of the conventional historical epic give way here to the ominous, the ambivalent, and the particular. For all its visual grandeur and allegorical possibility, There Will Be Blood is in many ways a brazenly specific story of petty rivalry and one-upmanship, revolving around a central protagonist whose loneliness, anger, and bone-deep suspicion of the world around him leads to some pretty weird behavior. Yet small-scale never gives way to quirky irrelevance.