In the San Fernando Valley, the lives of several disparate characters seeking salvation intersect and intertwine, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s landmark ensemble drama.
Utilising an all-star cast, Anderson elicited a career best performance from Tom Cruise, as well as the likes of Julianne Moore, Philip-Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, John C. Reilly and Philip Baker Hall in a film that interweaves the desperate lives of a toxic motivational speaker, a terminally ill gameshow host, a guilty housewife, a down on his luck cop, and many others, in a potent expression of American millennial anxiety.
The result is one of the landmark films of the 1990s, one that ranks alongside the great ensemble films of Robert Altman.