THE PTA FILM POWER RANKINGS

Paul Thomas Anderson's 10 features are all, at the very least, extremely good. But which is his best?

- BY MARK OLSEN

WILSON WEBB Warner Bros. Pictures MELINDA SUE GORDON Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures JULIANNE MOORE and Mark Wahlberg, clockwise from top left, star in "Boogie Nights"; Luis Guzmán and Adam Sandler in "Punch-Drunk Love"; Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim debut in "Licorice Pizza"; and Joaquin Phoenix in "Inherent Vice."

More so than with other directors, it's always tempting to overly psychologize Paul Thomas Anderson's films, looking for traces of his personal development and hints of autobiography: the father figures of “Magnolia” or “The Master,” the partnership of “Phantom Thread,” parenthood in the new “One Battle After Another.” Yet two things truly set his work apart. There's the incredibly high level of craft in each of them, giving each a unique feel, sensibility and visual identity, and also the deeply felt humanism: a pure love of people, for all their faults and foibles.

Anderson is an 11-time Academy Award nominee without ever having won, a situation that could rectify itself soon enough, and it speaks to the extremely high bar set by his filmography that one could easily reverse the following list and still end up with a credible, if perhaps more idiosyncratic ranking. Reorder the films however you like — they are all, still, at the very least, extremely good. Simply put, there's no one doing it like him.

Perhaps nothing marks Anderson as a filmmaker from the '90s as much as his impeccable use of music, from the drowned-in-sound deluge of “Boogie Nights” to his ongoing collaboration with Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood as a composer. So just to add to the arguability of the following list, we've also noted a favorite song or two from each movie, the song titles often becoming surprise summations of the plots themselves.