When Barry Egan (Sandler), a lonely, hot-tempered Californian businessman, meets Lena Leonard (Watson), romance blossoms between them. However, the course of their relationship runs anything but smoothly, especially when Lena has to contend with Barry’s occasional bouts of destructive rage and his accidental involvement in a phone sex racket run by petty Utah gangster Dean Trumbell (Philip Seymour Hoffman).
After a string of sprawling runtimes in his filmography, Paul Thomas Anderson returned to the concise, streamlined 90-min days of Hard Eight for this utterly hypnotic, genre-skipping romantic modern classic. Punctuated by gorgeous video art cutaways by Jeremy Blake, it was revelatory in demonstrating the astonishing range of Adam Sandler as a dramatic actor force to be reckoned with.