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Critics reviews

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE

Paul Thomas Anderson United States, 2002
My favorite part of the movie is when Barry goes to Hawaii. He suddenly realizes he can just go to her, even without the frequent-flier miles. This is also my favorite thing in life: the sudden understanding that you aren't condemned to sadness, that you can simply walk toward the thing you want.
November 16, 2016
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The camerawork trades the elegant Steadicam long takes that made Anderson famous for jittery, whip-pan motions and compositions that isolate Barry in the frame even when he is surrounded, making other people the bars in the prison he has erected in his mind. Anderson makes objective, distanced shots pulse with nervousness.
November 15, 2016
To a jaded soul, something like Mon Oncle is not what most moviegoers of 2002 would consider "real entertainment." But in its time and place, it was, and at repertory theaters still is; find any of Tati's features playing at a cinematheque, and they'll play to their audience. So would Punch-Drunk Love. Its pleasures are its own, and Anderson remains one of the few filmmakers of his generation for whom no new direction should be a surprise. His instincts have yet to land him in anyplace boring.
November 14, 2016
La Furia Umana
Punch-Drunk Love (2002) is a carefully choreographed film, and also a seemingly lightweight work within Anderson's filmography characterized as it is by pieces of huge ambition and scale. The film is first and foremost an exercise in careful synchronization between sound and image (the music was to a large extent worked out before shooting). Coordination as an overriding impulse suggests the search for actual correspondences in unexpected places.
December 16, 2015
None of this is played, really, for laughs; it's more about the absurdity of life, the chance relationships that occur, the inexplicable events that alter our destiny, and the need to keep on striving no matter what obstacles one might encounter. For once, Sandler's sad Sack persona is put to good use in a film, and Anderson directs him masterfully.
March 14, 2015
Sandler's manic energy assumes a disturbing edge under the aegis of Anderson's direction, while everything here—from the off-kilter compositions, to Jon Brion's playfully arrythmic score, and the astonishing use of color—is purpose-built to synaesthetically echo Barry's troubled psyche. Philip Seymour Hoffman, meanwhile, is a terrifying hoot as Barry's puce-faced nemesis: a carpet salesman-cum-phone sex line extortionist.
August 20, 2014
I don't just like Punch-Drunk Love, I love Punch-Drunk Love. I love it with an odd fear, and with my entire body, like how I feel when an anxiety attack has passed and my brain is still tripping from the surge of adrenaline -- when birds and trees and cab drivers suddenly gain a glowing, but warped beauty. An extraordinary, unique picture that manages to simultaneously subvert and showcase the Sandler persona beautifully, while maintaining Anderson's singular éclat as a filmmaker.
February 13, 2011
PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE is Paul Thomas Anderson's greatest work. This little 95-minute movie, made between two projects intended to be "epic" (MAGNOLIA and THERE WILL BE BLOOD) comes across as more epic than either--a struggle that's almost comically ordinary instead of one maximized for "meaning." It's also his most beautiful musical without being a musical; it could be a ballet, a little operetta, or a children's symphony.
February 6, 2009
P.T. Anderson's anguished romanticism achieves concision and melodic sweep in his fourth feature—a makeout movie for anger management candidates, a big sloppy kiss to Adam Sandler fans (who mostly wanted their money back), and the best studio release of 2002.
August 13, 2003
Film Critic: Adrian Martin
I have now seen Punch-Drunk Love three times, and every time it is a different film – a prism that successively reveals its dark and light facets. From one angle, it is a modern romantic comedy, with generous allusions to the colour palette and giddy, emotional tone of Hollywood musicals. From another angle, it is a disquieting essay on frustration, neurosis, aggression and violence. Ultimately, it is all these things mixed up together, indivisibly.
April 1, 2003
The film looks good and has its funny moments, but too often one senses Anderson straining to impress, whether by purloining (and misusing) a Harry Nilsson song from Altman's Popeye, or by tossing in yet another surreal, surprising or seemingly inexplicable narrative idiosyncrasy.
February 1, 2003
The movie is filled with so many surprises and weird unexplained events. And none of this unexpectedness felt random, to me. Or like a movie-director trying to be cryptic and artsy and clever. It actually felt like life. Not everything in life is connected or explained. Things work on us in subconscious nonverbal ways. Some things are meaningful only when we decide to put meaning on them.
October 31, 2002