Paul Thomas Anderson

George Toles is film studies' most astute close reader and its finest prose stylist. This book captures the ineffable strangeness of P. T. Anderson's films--their unusual forms, unsettled soundscapes, and characters wanting unmet connections. Toles explores the subjective interiors and cultural terrain these blinkered selves--and we viewers--cannot fully see. It's been said that actors are our substitutes, avatars who test unplumbed psychic depths. So it is with Toles, our guide to these miraculous films.--Carol Vernallis, author of Unruly Media: Youtube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema

Scriptwriter for films by Guy Maddin, George Toles is also one of the most insightful and articulate critics writing today. Tackling the enigmatic Paul Thomas Anderson, Toles probes these dramas of isolation, revealing both desperate violence and the possibility of communion.--Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity

Here, caught within its covers, is the inimitable George Toles's richly challenging and brilliantly lambent voyage into the world of P. T. Anderson. Always turning and returning, always leaping and quivering with thought, the book opens Anderson to a new sense of value and depth that reveals his poetry, his multiplicities, and his touch upon our lives.--Murray Pomerance, author of Moment of Action: Riddles of Cinematic Performance