The Master

Ponderous and demanding, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest slows to a rattlesnake-swallowing-a-mouse lurch. The mouse is Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), an aberrant WWII sailor transitioning to a life of department-store fistfights and drunkenness. The rattlesnake is Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a sci-fi writer and guru who commands on sea and land.