Critical response On
review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes,
There Will Be Blood has an approval rating of 91% based on 245 reviews, with an average rating of 8.5/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Widely touted as a masterpiece, this sparse and sprawling epic about the underhanded 'heroes' of capitalism boasts incredible performances by leads Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, and is director Paul Thomas Anderson's best work to date." On
Metacritic, the film has a
weighted average score of 93 out of 100, based on 42 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
Andrew Sarris called the film "an impressive achievement in its confident expertness in rendering the simulated realities of a bygone time and place, largely with an inspired use of regional amateur actors and extras with all the right moves and sounds." In
Premiere,
Glenn Kenny praised Day-Lewis's performance: "Once his Plainview takes wing, the relentless focus of the performance makes the character unique."
Manohla Dargis wrote, in her review for
The New York Times, "the film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic."
Esquire praised Day-Lewis's performance: "what's most fun, albeit in a frightening way, is watching this greedmeister become more and more unhinged as he locks horns with Eli Sunday ... both Anderson and Day-Lewis go for broke. But it's a pleasure to be reminded, if only once every four years, that subtlety can be overrated."
Richard Schickel in
Time praised
There Will Be Blood as "one of the most wholly original American movies ever made." Critic Tom Charity, writing about
CNN's ten-best films list, calls the film the only "flat-out masterpiece" of 2007. Schickel also named the film one of the Top 10 Movies of 2007, ranking it at No. 9, calling Daniel Day-Lewis's performance "astonishing", and calling the film "a mesmerizing meditation on the American spirit in all its maddening ambiguities: mean and noble, angry and secretive, hypocritical and more than a little insane in its aspirations." James Christopher, chief film critic for
The Times, published a list in April 2008 of his top 100 films, placing
There Will Be Blood in second place, behind only
Casablanca. Some critics were positive toward the work but less laudatory, often criticizing its ending.
Mick LaSalle of the
San Francisco Chronicle, challenged the film's high praise by saying "there should be no need to pretend
There Will Be Blood is a masterpiece just because Anderson sincerely tried to make it one" and noting that "the scenes between Day-Lewis and Dano ultimately degenerate into a ridiculous
burlesque." Several months after LaSalle's initial review of the film, he reiterated that while he still did not consider
There Will Be Blood to be a masterpiece, he wondered if its "style, an approach, an attitude... might become important in the future."
Roger Ebert assigned the film three and a half out of four stars and wrote, "
There Will Be Blood is the kind of film that is easily called great. I am not sure of its greatness. It was filmed in the same area of Texas used by
No Country for Old Men, and that is a great film, and a perfect one. But
There Will Be Blood is not perfect, and in its imperfections (its unbending characters, its lack of women or any reflection of ordinary society, its ending, its relentlessness) we may see its reach exceeding its grasp. Which is not a dishonorable thing." Carla Meyer of the
Sacramento Bee, who gave the film the same star rating as Ebert, opined that the final confrontation between Daniel and Eli marked when the work "stops being a masterpiece and becomes a really good movie. What was grand becomes petty, then overwrought." In 2014, Peter Walker of
The Guardian likewise argued that the scene "might not be the very worst scene in the history of recent Oscar-garlanded cinema ... but it's perhaps the one most inflated with its own delusional self-importance." Since 2008, the film has been included in the book
1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and every revised edition released afterwards.
Total Film placed it at number three in their list of the 50 best movies of
Total Film lifetime. In
The Guardian, journalist Steve Rose ranked it the 17th best arthouse film of all time, and in a separate 2019 ranking a panel of four
Guardian journalists ranked it the best film of the 21st century. In 2024, filmmaker
Quentin Tarantino named it one of the best films of the 21st century, although, in the following year,
he criticized Dano's performance and instead wanted to replace Austin Butler as a better choice if he'd top the best.
Top ten lists The film was on the
American Film Institute's 10 Movies of the Year; AFI's jury said:
There Will Be Blood is bravura film-making by one of American film's modern masters. Paul Thomas Anderson's epic poem of savagery, optimism and obsession is a true meditation on America. The film drills down into the dark heart of capitalism, where domination, not gain, is the ultimate goal. In a career defined by transcendent performances, Daniel Day-Lewis creates a character so rich and so towering, that "Daniel Plainview" will haunt the history of film for generations to come. The film appeared on many critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2007. • 1st – Ethar Alter,
Giant • 1st – Scott Foundas,
LA Weekly • 7th –
Peter Travers,
Rolling Stone Chicago Tribune and
At the Movies critic
Michael Phillips named
There Will Be Blood the decade's best film. Phillips stated: This most eccentric and haunting of modern epics is driven by oilman Daniel Plainview, who, in the hands of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, becomes a
Horatio Alger story gone horribly wrong. Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's camera is as crucial to the film's hypnotic pull as the performance at its center. For its evocation of the early 1900s, its relentless focus on one man's fascinating obsessions, and for its inspiring example of how to freely adapt a novel—plus, what I think is the performance of the new century—
There Will Be Blood stands alone. The more I see it, the sadder, and stranger, and more visually astounding it grows—and the more it seems to say about the best and worst in the American ethos of rugged individualism. Awfully good!
Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwarzbaum named
There Will Be Blood the decade's best film as well. In her original review, Schwarzbaum stated: Anyhow, a fierce story meshing big exterior-oriented themes of American character with an interior-oriented portrait of an impenetrable man (two men, really, including the false prophet Sunday) is only half Anderson's quest, and his exciting achievement. The other half lies in the innovation applied to the telling itself. For a huge picture,
There Will Be Blood is exquisitely intimate, almost a collection of sketches. For a long, slow movie, it speeds. For a story set in the fabled bad-old-days past, it's got the terrors of modernity in its DNA. Leaps of romantic chordal grandeur from Brahms' Violin Concerto in D Major announce the launch of a fortune-changing oil well down the road from Eli Sunday's church—and then, much later, announce a kind of end of the world. For bleakness, the movie can't be beat—nor for brilliance. In December 2009, the website
Gawker.com determined that
There Will Be Blood is film critics' consensus best film of the decade when aggregating all Best of the Decade lists, stating: "And when the votes were all in, by a nose,
There Will Be Blood stood alone at the top of the decade, its straw in the whole damn cinema's milkshake." The list of critics who lauded
There Will Be Blood in their assessments of films from the past decade include: •
The A.V. Club •
The Daily Telegraph •
Peter Bradshaw of
The Guardian •
Slant Magazine •
Time Out New York •
David Denby,
The New Yorker • Scott Foundas,
SF Weekly • David Germain and
Christy Lemire, The
Associated Press • Bill Goodykoontz,
The Arizona Republic • Ann Hornaday,
The Washington Post •
Wesley Morris,
The Boston Globe •
Michael Phillips,
Chicago Tribune • Lisa Schwarzbaum,
Entertainment Weekly • Dana Stevens,
Slate Magazine •
Peter Travers,
Rolling Stone • Chris Vognar,
The Dallas Morning News The February 2020 issue of
New York Magazine lists
There Will Be Blood alongside
Citizen Kane,
Sunset Boulevard,
Dr. Strangelove,
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
The Conversation,
Nashville,
Taxi Driver,
The Elephant Man,
Pulp Fiction,
In the Bedroom, and
Roma as "The Best Movies That Lost Best Picture at the Oscars."
Best of the Century lists Filmmakers
Denis Villeneuve,
Antoine Fuqua,
Darius Khondji,
Cord Jefferson,
Joanna Hogg,
Reinaldo Marcus Green,
Kate Berlant,
Josh Safdie,
Robert Eggers and
Jason Blum have all cited the film as among the best of the 21st century. In 2016, it was voted the number three in the
BBC's 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century as picked by 177 film critics from around the world. In 2021, members of
Writers Guild of America West (WGAW) and
Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) ranked its screenplay 7th in WGA’s 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century (so far). In June 2025, the film ranked number three on
The New York Times list of "
The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century" and ranked number 4 on its "Readers' Choice" edition of the list. In July 2025,
Rolling Stone ranked
There Will Be Blood as the best movie of the 21st century.
Accolades == See also ==