The Master

One of the best movies I've seen this decade, century, millennium...! The wonderful luscious cinematography, the incredible low-key score are both wonderful backgrounds to Hoffmann & Phoenix playing off each other as well as any two actors I've ever seen [maybe Falstaff & the young Henry V?]. Phoenix is cringeworthy in the highest sense of inspiring fear and awe when he starts to mix his potent cocktails of paint thinner and engine fluids that so entrance Hoffmann, whose Lancaster Dodd is the ultimate con artist until [spoiler alert] he interrupts his Waldorf disquisition with "pig fuck!" to a skeptic. Who later gets his butt kicked by Freddie Quell, aka Joaquin... The higher and lower ranges of con artistry are explored with a surgeon's special micro-eyeglasses and Paul Thomas Anderson's amazing scalpel. Hoffmann and Phoenix's acting is such that you can read Lancaster Dodd's high-pitched chicanery and Freddie Quell's caged-animal cunning in their faces. There is so much artistry abounding in this film that I give it a high five...stars, that is!