In a sentenceTom Cruise is selling confidence, and nobody else in Los Angeles seems to have any
In Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, several people’s lives intersect as they struggle with love, loss and regret. Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise) leads motivational seminars built on contempt for women. Elsewhere, the stories take in Officer Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly), Claudia Wilson Gator (Melora Walters), Linda Partridge (Julianne Moore) and Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall). William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jason Robards also appear in Paul Thomas Anderson’s ensemble drama. Its characters face their own distress while the film follows the connections and coincidences that bring their experiences together.
Plays from YouTube when you press play; nothing loads from them until then.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling drama is moving, superbly acted and occasionally exhausting. We recommend it for the people it makes us care about, with a warning that 189 minutes of distress can leave little room to breathe.
Magnolia is worth its 189 minutes, though we would not pretend they pass lightly. Paul Thomas Anderson writes and directs an ensemble drama about people across Los Angeles struggling with loss, regret and one another. The scale is part of the pleasure: someone who initially seems peripheral can become the person we most need to hear from. Anderson gives this cast time to make that change in our attention feel earned.
Tom Cruise’s Frank T.J. Mackey, a motivational speaker peddling contempt for women, is the most immediately gripping presence. Cruise gives his pronouncements the assurance of a man who expects applause, and that assurance makes him dangerous. We were repelled by the seminar, particularly by how entertaining Cruise makes the contempt. Anderson gives him enough space to be objectionable without reducing him to a convenient villain. Cruise deserves the attention, although the film has other performances worth watching just as closely.
John C. Reilly’s Officer Jim Kurring and Melora Walters’s Claudia Wilson Gator give us people whose uncertainty is easier to recognise than Mackey’s swagger. Reilly is particularly valuable in a film so full of actors being asked to express pain at full volume; his presence gives us a chance to listen without bracing ourselves. Walters makes Claudia’s distress difficult to dismiss as another helping of misery. We care about these people, which is why the repeated crises can become tiring.
Robert Elswit’s fluid camerawork helps us follow the large cast without making every arrival feel like another introduction. It also gives long passages an urgency that survives the switches between stories. Editor Dylan Tichenor keeps those stories pressing on our attention, and his cutting makes a substantial contribution to the film’s grip. The problem comes when distress follows distress: a change of character cannot always make another breakdown feel different.
Jon Brion’s music reinforces the pressure, sometimes more than the acting needs. We wanted a little less help feeling the weight of these encounters; the cast is already doing enough. The production design by Mark Bridges and William Arnold is less demanding of our attention, and usefully so. Their settings let us concentrate on the people rather than search the rooms for explanations of them, a welcome restraint in such an insistent film.
Anderson’s writing is less disciplined than his staging. He can make several characters voice their unhappiness so insistently that we start noticing the repetition before we notice what distinguishes them. Ensemble dramas ask us to keep a great deal in mind, and Magnolia occasionally behaves as though letting a feeling subside would mean losing us altogether. Anderson could afford to leave more of the work to his actors, particularly when their expressions already tell us enough.
We recommend watching it in one sitting, with enough patience to let the less immediately arresting people become important. There is plenty here to reward that patience, especially for anyone who enjoys following a large cast through separate stories. Just choose an evening when there is room for somebody else’s unhappiness.
Most critics admire Magnolia: eighteen of twenty reviews are positive and none is hostile. The word that recurs is ambition. Reviewers describe a sprawling ensemble drama of lonely lives in the San Fernando Valley, built in the manner of Robert Altman, and most think the gamble pays off. The acting is the department almost everyone singles out, and Tom Cruise’s misogynist self-help guru is the performance named most often, with John C. Reilly, Melora Walters, Jason Robards and Philip Seymour Hoffman also mentioned. The frog rain is widely read as the film’s daring high point.
The reservations cluster around length and control. Several critics call the three hours exhausting, self-indulgent or repetitive, and a few feel the parts outweigh the whole. The New York Times and The New Yorker are the most doubtful, finding the late reach for larger meaning arbitrary and the sum not quite adding up. The spread is fairly narrow, though: even the mixed reviews recommend the performances.
The critic hails it as a dark, daring and dazzling epic with a superb cast, particularly Tom Cruise, and unpredictable scenarios that command attention despite the indulgent runtime.
Read the full review →The critic praises the film's deep exploration of childhood cruelty's lasting effects and its wise, sympathetic portrayal of flawed characters seeking connection and redemption. He highlights the ensemble performances and the philosophical use of coincidence and the frog-rain sequence as elevating the story beyond melodrama.
Read the full review →The critic praises Magnolia as a cathartic masterpiece that explores unresolved trauma and the joys of acceptance and letting go, singling out the climactic frog rain as the most purely cathartic moment in cinema history.
Read the full review →Magnolia is a compelling, multi-faceted drama that refreshes the ensemble-interconnected-stories format with character revelations, script surprises and strong performances across the board. Tom Cruise delivers a standout electric performance as the misogynistic TJ, making the three-hour runtime worthwhile despite minor sags.
Read the full review →The critic praises the ambitious scope, grand operatic style, and superlative ensemble that confirm Anderson as one of Hollywood's most audacious filmmakers, highlighting the film's meditation on fate, coincidence, and interconnection.
Read the full review →The critic praises the film's ambitious, sprawling structure that interweaves multiple stories and characters across the San Fernando Valley, highlighting its anti-realist elements and strong performances, especially Tom Cruise's. It is seen as a gamble that pays off through its intensity, cinematography, and nerve, despite its length.
Read the full review →
Short CutsAnother Los Angeles ensemble, with more dry humour and less insistence.
Yi YiFamily troubles observed with patience, and room for people to surprise us.
Amores perrosInterconnected lives and painful consequences, told with a rougher physical urgency.
Secrets & LiesFamily hurt, awkward encounters and actors given time to make us care.
The Sweet HereafterA community’s grief, explored through several lives with considerably less noise.
Free account
Two lists that know where things are streaming, collections you can share, your own score beside ours, and Discover that remembers what you have seen.
