The Master
Weinstein Company, The | Release Date: September 14, 2012 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
86
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 43 Critic Reviews
Positive:
37
Mixed:
5
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Total FilmEmma DibdinNov 4, 2012
With potent performers and poetic visuals, Anderson has made the boldest American picture of the year. Its strangeness can be hard to process, but this is a shattering study of the impossibility of recovering the past. Read full review
100
EmpireDamon WiseOct 29, 2012
An often brilliant '50s-throwback character drama that never feels nostalgic, with terrific central performances and a luminous, unforgettable visual beauty. Read full review
100
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceySep 20, 2012
Like Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," Anderson's latest is enigmatic. But if you have eyes and can see, The Master it is unmistakably some kind of wonder. At least, it's an exhilarating demonstration of big-screen moviemaking in dreamlike colours and a sense-heightening 70-mm format. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeWesley MorrisSep 20, 2012
Nothing as big and strange and right as The Master should feel as effortless as it does. That's not the same as saying that it's light. It's actually heavy. It weighs more than any American film from this or last year. It's the sort of movie that young men aspiring to write the Great American Novel never actually write. Read full review
100
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsSep 20, 2012
The Master is not a schematic attack on a particular religion. It is a brilliantly conceived and powerfully realized work of art, with complex characters, exquisite images and ambiguously big ideas. Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsSep 20, 2012
The Master is brilliantly, wholly itself for a little more than half of its 137 minutes. Then it chases its own tail a bit and settles for being merely a fascinating metaphoric father-son relationship reaching endgame. It may not all "work," but most of it's remarkable. Read full review
100
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallSep 19, 2012
This is a rapturous cinematic experience, a spellbinding expression of shrouded ideas and exposed talent, top to bottom. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranSep 14, 2012
The Master takes some getting used to. This is a superbly crafted film that's at times intentionally opaque, as if its creator didn't want us to see all the way into its heart of darkness. Read full review
100
Entertainment WeeklyLisa SchwarzbaumSep 14, 2012
It's also one of the great movies of the year - an ambitious, challenging, and creatively hot-blooded but cool toned project that picks seriously at knotty ideas about American personality, success, rootlessness, master-disciple dynamics, and father-son mutually assured destruction. Read full review
100
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerSep 14, 2012
The performances by Phoenix and Hoffman are studies in contrast. Phoenix carries himself with a jagged, lurching, simianlike grace while Hoffman gives Dodd a calm deliberateness. Both actors have rarely been better in the movies. The real Master class here is about acting – and that includes just about everybody else in the film, especially Adams, whose twinkly girl-next-door quality is used here to fine subversive effect. Read full review
100
The New York TimesA.O. ScottSep 13, 2012
It is a movie about the lure and folly of greatness that comes as close as anything I've seen recently to being a great movie. There will be skeptics, but the cult is already forming. Count me in. Read full review
100
The A.V. ClubScott TobiasSep 12, 2012
It's a feisty, contentious, deliberately misshapen film, designed to challenge and frustrate audiences looking for a clean resolution. Just because it's over doesn't mean it's settled. Read full review
100
Rolling StonePeter TraversSep 10, 2012
Written, directed, acted, shot, edited and scored with a bracing vibrancy that restores your faith in film as an art form, The Master is nirvana for movie lovers. Anderson mixes sounds and images into a dark, dazzling music that is all his own. Read full review
100
The GuardianXan BrooksSep 1, 2012
The themes may be contentious, but the handling is perfect. If there were ever a movie to cause the lame to walk and the blind to see, The Master may just be it. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthySep 1, 2012
Two things stand out: the extraordinary command of cinematic technique, which alone is nearly enough to keep a connoisseur on the edge of his seat the entire time, and the tremendous portrayals by Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman of two entirely antithetical men Read full review
95
NPRElla TaylorSep 14, 2012
Without ever saying so, the movie adds up to nothing less than a social psychology of the nervous, spiritually questing geist of post-World War II America. Read full review
90
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzSep 19, 2012
The film is not an epic. It's not a masterpiece. But it is an involving study of men searching, searching for answers, for belonging, for a foothold in life at a time when footholds were hard to find. Read full review
90
SalonAndrew O'HehirSep 15, 2012
The Master is often spectacular and never less than handsome, and it has numerous moments of disturbing and almost electrical power. I can't say, after one viewing, that I found it moving or satisfying as a whole, but I'm also not sure it's supposed to be. This is an almost apocalyptic tale of thwarted emotion - love cut short - set in a pitiless land of delusions. Read full review
90
MovielineAlison WillmoreSep 13, 2012
What makes The Master such a singular experience, as dense as a mille-feuille, is that it is not Lancaster's story but Freddie's, and told as such, in layers that are sensorially rich but that do not always lead easily from one to another. Read full review
90
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternSep 13, 2012
Paul Thomas Anderson's remarkable sixth feature addresses, by extension, the all-too-human process of eager seekers falling under the spell of charismatic authority figures, be they gurus, dictators or cult leaders. Or, in the case of this masterly production, a couple of spellbinding actors. Read full review
90
Village VoiceKarina LongworthSep 11, 2012
It's a film of breathtaking cinematic romanticism and near-complete denial of conventional catharsis. You might wish it gave you more in terms of comfort food pleasure, but that's not Anderson's problem. Read full review
90
The New YorkerAnthony LaneSep 10, 2012
On reflection, and despite these cavils, we should bow to The Master, because it gives us so much to revere, starting with the image that opens the film and recurs right up to the end-the turbid, blue-white wake of a ship. There goes the past, receding and not always redeemable, and here comes the future, waiting to churn us up. Read full review
90
VarietyJustin ChangSep 1, 2012
The writer-director's typically eccentric sixth feature is a sustained immersion in a series of hypnotic moods and longueurs, an imposing picture that thrillingly and sometimes maddeningly refuses to conform to expectations. Read full review
88
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanSep 20, 2012
Anderson tells this story slowly, inexorably, with a sense of control I've never felt from him before. This is the least violent of his five dramas, the first where nobody dies. It's also the bleakest. Read full review
88
New York PostLou LumenickSep 11, 2012
It's a sharply written, unforgettably directed character study with brilliant performances by Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams - far more intimate but no less intense than director Paul Thomas Anderson's Oscar-winning last film, "There Will Be Blood.'' Read full review
83
Portland OregonianShawn LevySep 20, 2012
Anderson, god love him, seems determined to make the "Great American Film." The Master isn't it, but you come away from it with the sense that may be on the right path. Read full review
83
The PlaylistCharlie SchmidilinAug 17, 2012
Even amongst its most wrenching scenes of unfettered anger and broken loyalty, a volatile sensuality nonetheless invades every frame of Paul Thomas Anderson's arresting The Master. Read full review
80
SlateDana StevensSep 21, 2012
The Master is above all a love story between Joaquin Phoenix's damaged WWII vet, Freddie Quell, and Philip Seymour Hoffmann's charismatic charlatan, Lancaster Dodd. And that relationship is powerful and funny and twisted and strange enough that maybe that's all the movie needs to be about. Read full review
80
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierSep 13, 2012
This superb, cerebral film about unchecked belief is a fictionalized and cutting drama hinging on the origins of Scientology. Scratch around a bit, though, and its wider indictments become clear. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinSep 8, 2012
If I seem cool, it might be because I came in hoping for the same level of blood-and-thunder as in the Evangelical scenes of "There Will Be Blood," whereas The Master is a cerebral experience. But Anderson has gone about exploring fundamental tensions in the American character with more discipline than I once thought him capable. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaSep 20, 2012
Phoenix's performance is one of such wild, intense abandon that it is not to be believed, and this, in fact, was my problem as The Master sailed into its momentum-less second hour. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliSep 14, 2012
Yet, for all of The Master's laudable elements, it falls short of greatness for one simple reason: the storytelling is unspectacular. Read full review
70
Boxoffice MagazineSara Maria VizcarrondoSep 2, 2012
The Master is big screen marvel intended for 70mm projection (a rare treat), with some beautiful imagery, but often inaudible dialogue. Phoenix's lived-in mumble comes off about as clear as Fenster from The Usual Suspects and Amy Adam's precise diction can't even save her harshest talking points. Read full review
70
TimeRichard CorlissSep 1, 2012
While the movie is glorious to watch, it brings no coherence or insight to its two main characters. Read full review
63
Washington PostAnn HornadaySep 21, 2012
By bringing so much thought, verve and visual poetry to bear on two neurotics acting out -- rather than on the larger cultural story they anticipate and embody -- The Master turns out to be more of a self-defeating whimper than the big, important bang it could have been. Read full review
63
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertSep 19, 2012
Fabulously well-acted and crafted, but when I reach for it, my hand closes on air. It has rich material and isn't clear what it thinks about it. It has two performances of Oscar caliber, but do they connect? Read full review
63
USA TodayClaudia PuigSep 13, 2012
Anderson has taken pains to re-create the '50s with superb production design and gorgeous cinematography. But he seems less concerned with whether the audience is along for the ride. The story can leave viewers at sea, floundering to give meaning to what they are watching. Read full review
60
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottSep 21, 2012
What Anderson's talky and willfully opaque film doesn't have, however, is an unfailingly compelling story to tell. Read full review
60
Time OutJoshua RothkopfSep 11, 2012
I'd trade much of The Master for one extraordinary moment played by the ever-improving Amy Adams, in front of the bathroom mirror with Hoffman. Read full review
50
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezSep 21, 2012
The Master has become a contest between two gifted actors trying to shout each other down. The commitment to their roles is impressive, but it's tethered to a weightless, airless movie, a film so enamored of itself, the audience gets shut out. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleSep 20, 2012
If it were just a middling effort, The Master would be a lot less frustrating. But the latest from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has greatness in it - two extraordinary performances, intuitive and revealing photography and scene setting, and a distinct directorial sensibility that hovers between sobriety and satire. Yet all those virtues are undermined by a narrative that goes all but dead for the last hour. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineCalum MarshSep 10, 2012
The Master is Paul Thomas Anderson with the edges sanded off, the best bits shorn down to nubs. Read full review
25
ObserverRex ReedSep 18, 2012
Call The Master whatever you want, but lobotomized catatonia from what I call the New Hacks can never take the place of well-made narrative films about real people that tell profound stories for a broader and more sophisticated audience. Fads come and go, but as Walter Kerr used to say, "I'll yell tripe whenever tripe is served." Read full review
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