‘The Master' Awards & Reviews

AWARDS

Austin Film Critics
Winner
Best Director - Paul Thomas Anderson
 Best Actor  - Joaquin Phoenix
 Best Cinematography - Mihai Malaimare Jr.

Australian Academy Awards
Nominee 
International Best Screenplay - Paul Thomas Anderson
International  Best Actor  - Joaquin Phoenix

AV Club
Winner
 Best Film of 2012

BAFTA Awards
Nominee
Best Original Screenplay - Paul Thomas Anderson
 Best Leading Actor  - Joaquin Phoenix
Best Supporting Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman
Best Supporting Actress - Amy Adams

Boston Film Critics
Winner
Best Cinematography - Mihai Malaimare Jr.
Runner-Up
Best Director - Paul Thomas Anderson

Boston Online Film Critics
Winner
Best Original Score - Jonny Greenwood

Chicago Film Critics
Winner
Best Supporting Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman
Best Supporting Actress - Amy Adams
Best Cinematography - Mihai Malaimare Jr.
Best Original Score - Jonny Greenwood

Critics Choice Awards
Winner
 Best Supporting Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman 
Nominee
Best Picture
Best Original Screenplay - Paul Thomas Anderson
 Best Leading Actor  - Joaquin Phoenix
Best Supporting Actress - Amy Adams
Best Cinematography - Mihai Malaimare Jr.
Best Score - Jonny Greenwood

Florida Film Critics
Winner
 Best Supporting Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman

Golden Globes
Nominee
Best Actor, Drama - Joaquin Phoenix
Best Supporting Actress - Amy Adams
Best Supporting Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman

IFP Gotham Awards
Nominee
Best Feature

Indiewire Critics Poll
Runner-Up
 Best Film of 2012 

 Kansas City Critics
Winner
Best Film
Best Original Screenplay - Paul Thomas Anderson
Best Supporting Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman

LA Film Critics 
Winner
Best Director  - Paul Thomas Anderson
Best Actor  - Joaquin Phoenix
Best Supporting Actress - Amy Adams
Best Production Design - Jack Fisk & David Crank
Runner-Up
Best Film
Best Cinematography - Mihai Malaimare Jr.
Best Music Score - Jonny Greenwood

London Film Critics Circle
Winner
Best Actor  - Joaquin Phoenix
 Best Supporting Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman

National Society of Film Critics
Winner
Best Supporting Actress - Amy Adams
 Best Cinematography - Mihai Malaimare Jr.
Runner-Up
Best Picture
Best Director  - Paul Thomas Anderson
 Best Screenplay - Paul Thomas Anderson
Best Actor  - Joaquin Phoenix
 2nd Runner-Up
 Best Supporting Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman

Online Film Critics Society
Winner
 Best Director  - Paul Thomas Anderson
  Best Supporting Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman

San Diego Film Critics
Winner
Best Original Screenplay - Paul Thomas Anderson
Best Score - Jonny Greenwood

San Francisco Film Critics
Winner
Best Picture
Best Actor - Joaquin Phoenix

Sight & Sound
Winner
Best Film of 2012

Southeastern Film Critics Association
Winner
 Best Supporting Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman

Toronto Film Critics Association
Winner
Best Film
Best Director  - Paul Thomas Anderson
Best Original Screenplay - Paul Thomas Anderson
Best Supporting Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman

Vancouver Film Critics Association
Winner 
Best Actor  - Joaquin Phoenix
Best Supporting Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman
Best Supporting Actress - Amy Adams

Venice Film Festival
Winner
Silver Lion (Best Director) - Paul Thomas Anderson
Best Actor (tie) - Joaquin Phoenix & Philip Seymour Hoffman

Village Voice
Winner
Best Film of 2012

Washington DC Film Critics
Winner
Best Supporting Actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman
Best Score - Jonny Greenwood

WGA
Nominee
Best Original Screenplay - Paul Thomas Anderson

REVIEWS

Variety

"Even when the narrative drifts into increasingly ambiguous waters, the sheer brilliance of the filmmaking holds one rapt."

NY Times
"It is a movie about the lure and folly of greatness that comes as close as anything I’ve seen recently to being a great movie. There will be skeptics, but the cult is already forming. Count me in."

LA Times
"It's a film bristling with vivid moments and unbeatable acting, but its interest is not in tidy narrative satisfactions but rather the excesses and extremes of human behavior, the interplay of troubled souls desperate to find their footing."

Rolling Stone
"The Master, the sixth film from the 42-year-old writer-director, affirms his position as the foremost filmmaking talent of his generation. Anderson is a rock star, the artist who knows no limits. Fierce and ferociously funny, The Master is a great movie, the best of the year so far, and a new American classic."

The New Yorker
"The tale of his dissolution, which consumes the first portion of the movie, casts a spell as bewitching, but also as controlled, as anything that the writer and director, Paul Thomas Anderson, has wrought before."

The Village Voice
"You might wish it gave you more in terms of comfort food pleasure, but that's not Anderson's problem. You've just seen too many movies about incommunicative fuck-ups who manage to break down their defenses at some convenient third-act moment, assuring that order will be restored."

The Hollywood Reporter

"Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master is masterful for sure, as well as enthralling and perplexing. But an argument that will endure for as long as people feel like seeing and talking about the film is whether it adds up to the sum of its many brilliant parts."

New York Magazine
 "Anderson’s latest and most glacial drama, The Master, is a piece of stark, often abrasive American mythmaking. Anderson is a romantic who has earned his nihilism. He clarifies nothing, but leaves us brooding on our own confusion."

Entertainment Weekly
"It's also one of the great movies of the year — an ambitious, challenging, and creatively hot-blooded but cool toned project that picks seriously at knotty ideas about American personality, success, rootlessness, master-disciple dynamics, and father-son mutually assured destruction."

Salon
"There are certainly passages of the sort of “Citizen Kane” ambition you expect from Anderson here, not least in the memorable leading performances by Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix and the magnificent wide-screen cinematography of Mihai Malaimare Jr."

Film Comment

"As always with Anderson, the character opposition borders on the schematic, and the structure threatens to come apart at the seams. But the courting of danger is exactly what makes his films so exciting, this new film most of all."

Slate
"...If that sounds a little abstract, that’s because, despite being transfixed for the whole of its 137-minute running time, I left the theater not entirely sure what The Master was about. I can’t wait to get back and see it again."

NPR
"Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master is both feverish and glacial. The vibe is chilly, but the central character is an unholy mess — and his rage saturates every frame."

Wall Street Journal
""The Master" is a big, brave and universal saga of a man who, in the words of Dodd's wife, "can't take this life straight," and who vouchsafes his vestigial faith to a brilliant riddler wrapped up in an enigma. As gifts to homo sapiens go, it's a rich one."

Associated Press
"Anderson, long a master himself of technique and tone, has created a startling, stunningly gorgeous film shot in lushly vibrant 65mm, with powerful performances all around and impeccable production design."

Telegraph UK

"After one viewing, The Master already feels like a landmark American movie. It makes words like ‘bold’ and ‘extraordinary’ seem utterly inadequate."

Guardian UK

"It is a movie that may alienate and exasperate some, but its audacity, its formal daring and Joaquin Phoenix's performance, make it simply unmissable." 

MSN Movies
"Quite possibly the movie of the year, or the decade."

The Playlist

"For the moment, we’re simply pleased that the film marks an undeniable progression in the career of one of our most gifted directors." 

In Contention

"Elliptical but hardly indecisive, testy but hardly incendiary, Anderson's exquisitely sculpted film is about more individual-based values and desires than its grabby advance reputation as a Scientology exposé promised: trust, admiration, sex, kinship."

The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.

Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

Movieline
"The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind."

The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.

Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.

Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.

Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referraldf

The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind

Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind

Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.

Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.

Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.

Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.

Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

The Master is a more opaque sibling to There Will Be Blood, a story that, like that earlier one, feels like an abstract American creation myth, a celluloid koan to be turned over in the mind.

Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/09/13/review-master-joaquin-phoenix-philip-seymour-hoffman-paul-thomas-anderson-scientology/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

Anne Thompson

"A film that’s majestic and masterly if not a masterpiece, which draws sustenance from masters of the past, filmic, literary and artistic, and is pinioned by two colossal characters as it recounts the early, stuttering formation of a Scientology-style self-help belief system."

Cinevue

"This is an important, intelligent, epic and yet intimate piece of filmmaking from a master at the height of his powers."

The Film Stage

"It’s that aggressively enigmatic type of storytelling that makes The Master the most cryptic film Anderson has made yet. It’s often an electrifying move, removing us from scene-to-scene concerns that Freddie clearly gives no mind to, and powerfully distilling the volcanic emotion of the situations."