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An examination of the life of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a fictional oil pioneer who transforms himself from a lowly silver miner to a powerful and influential early 20th-century tycoon, letting nothing, and no one, get in his way in the process.

Big question: It’s been five years since filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love,” and his latest work has been hotly anticipated by hardcore film fans for every moment he’s been anyway. Can anything live up to that kind of pressure?

Catch it: “There Will Be Blood” combines the wide open spaces of an early America epic with the limited narrative scope of a misanthropic character study. The result is unexpectedly claustrophobic and extraordinarily captivating. Plainview is on screen for nearly every minute of the film—there's never a character introduced who isn't there specifically to play off him—so it's essential that Anderson utilizes an actor as powerful as Day-Lewis. The Oscar-winner responds to the challenge with larger than life work worthy of “performance of the year” honors.

Skip it: If you’re looking for a faithful adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s landmark novel “Oil!,” which Anderson used as a loose inspiration. Both the novel and the film provide an unflinching look at the dangers of oil mining, but the film’s narrative is uniquely its own.

Bottom line: It’s no mistake that the title sounds like a warning, a twisted promise of devastation. Films this tough don’t come along very often, and “There Will Be Blood” runs so against the grain of the mainstream that unsuspecting audiences will surely recoil in disgust at its bleakness, intensity and bloodshed. But this cinematic gut-punch is also a wake-up call for the potential of a film to get under the viewers’ skin. At a time when most movies are as expendable as fast food, here’s one you won’t be able to shake off anytime soon.

Bonus: The film’s consistently evolving original music was composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, in his first score for a feature film.

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