Virtual Seminar: There Will Be Blood

Rolling Stone film critic and senior editor David Fear leads this virtual seminar on Paul Thomas Anderson's tremendous Oscar-winning drama.

A sprawling epic of family, faith, power, and oil, There Will Be Blood is set on the incendiary frontier of California's turn-of-the-century petroleum boom. The story chronicles the life and times of one Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), who transforms himself from a down-and-out silver miner raising a son on his own into a self-made oil tycoon. When Plainview gets a mysterious tip-off that there's a little town out West where an ocean of oil is oozing out of the ground, he heads with his son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), to take their chances in dust-worn Little Boston. In this hardscrabble town, where the main excitement centers around the holy roller church of charismatic preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), Plainview and H.W. make their lucky strike. But even as the well raises all of their fortunes, nothing will remain the same as conflicts escalate and every human value -- love, hope, community, belief, ambition, and even the bond between father and son -- is imperiled by corruption, deception, and the flow of oil.

David Fear is a film critic and senior editor at Rolling Stone; he was previously the film editor at Time Out New York. His work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Village Voice, Film Comment, Esquire, SPIN, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and various other sundry publications. He lives in Brooklyn.

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