ambition | the m0vie blog

436. There Will Be Blood (#142)

Posted on September 13, 2025 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, this week with special guests Phil Bagnall and Darcie Faccio, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users.

This week, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood.

Daniel Plainview is an oil man at the turn of the twentieth century. A prospector who struck lucky in California, Plainview has dedicated his life to the pursuit of black gold on the edge of the American continent. As he stumble across a potentially life-changing find, the veteran businessman finds himself thrown into conflict with that other great American industry: organised religion.

At time of recording, it was ranked 142nd on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: ambition, american cinema, character complexities, cinematography, contemporary societal issues, Daniel Day-Lewis, Daniel Plainview, film, great american film, greed, identity, imdb, Jonny Greenwood, moral ambiguity, Movie, Paul Thomas Anderson, podcast, power, score, technical achievements, The 250, there will be blood, visual style | Leave a comment »

The Virtue of Ambitious Failure…

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Darren

When I was compiling my “top twelve” list for 2011, there were a lot of films contending for a place on that list. I felt bad about having to leave off stuff like We Need to Talk About Kevin and Preludio and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. However, I didn’t find myself trying to justify the inclusion of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, despite the fact that I found the film completely and utterly compelling. I’ll be the first to concede that Soderbergh’s disease epic had some fairly considerable flaws, too many for me to legitimately rank it “one of the best of the year”, and yet I think it’s one of those movies I couldn’t stop thinking about. What it is it about an ambitious failure that makes it so much more fascinating than a modest success?