Idiosyncratic Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the most fascinating directors working in film today. Hardly a prolific filmmaker, 2012’s The Master is only his sixth film in sixteen years.

Born in 1970, his father, actor Ernie Anderson was the first man on his block to own a VCR. Young Anderson grew up making home videos with a video camera that he would edit from VCR to VCR.

His first film, 1996’s Hard Eight about a casino gambler who is also a murderer, earned numerous Independent Spirit Award nominations including two for Anderson for Best New First Feature and Best First Screenplay. His second, 1997’s Boogie Nights, about a porn star of the 1970s and 80s, won numerous awards and received three Oscar nominations including Anderson’s first for Best Original Screenplay. His third, 1999’s Magnolia, about a disparate group of people seeking happiness, forgiveness and meaning in the San Fernando Valley earned another three Oscar nominations including another for Anderson for Best Original Screenplay.

His fourth, 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love earned Adam Sandler the best notices of his career as a novelty goods salesman, but did not earn Anderson the same level of acclaim as his previous films. He came roaring back with 2007’s There Will Be Blood loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil!. Nominated for eight Oscars, it won two including Daniel Day-Lewis’ second for Best Actor. Three of the film’s nominations went to Anderson for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay.

Early word on The Master was that it would be a thinly disguised exposé of Scientology with frequent Anderson player Philip Seymour Hoffman portraying a character based on Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard with Jeremy Renner and Reese Witherspoon co-starring. Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams, not Renner and Witherspoon, were actually cast and the heavily guarded film opened to mass confusion amongst critics and audiences alike. It was a film that you either loved or hated, but it was not an exposé of Scientology.

To understand the film, you have to understand Anderson, whose influences include Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman and John Huston. He considers John Huston’s 1948 film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was a heavy influence on There Will Be Blood to be a perfect film. It’s no coincidence that Day-Lewis sounds very much like Walter Huston in the film.

Anderson fell asleep every night watching The Treasure of the Sierra Madre during the filming of There Will Be Blood. The central character in The Master is not Hoffman who plays a mix of L. Ron Hubbard and similar false prophets who cropped up in the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War. It is rather, Phoenix who plays a prototype of one of the mentally disturbed World War II servicemen depicted in John Huston’s 1946 documentary Let There Be Light, narrated by Walter Huston, which is included as an extra on the Blu-ray and DVD releases.

In fact, scenes and the real life dialogue of There Will Be Light are liberally copied in The Master in which the troubled sailor (Phoenix) is deemed cured of his demons and released back into society by the government, but really isn’t. On the way to his eventual redemption he meets “the master” and his wife (Adams) who take into to their “family”. It’s a relationship that is doomed from the start.

Phoenix, an actor who has shown spurts of great acting within an up and down career, has never been better. There are shades of Montgomery Clift in The Search and From Here to Eternity and Marlon Brando in The Men, as well as his older brother, the gone too soon River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho. Hoffman, an actor who is almost always praised for his performances, does his most commendable on-screen work to date as the cult leader who makes it up as he goes along. Adams, in one of her best roles, is steely resolve personified as Hoffman’s wife.

Some reviewers have over-analyzed the film, as they do most of Anderson’s work to his consternation. When asked to explain the frogs raining down in Magnolia, Anderson famously responded that if he could have afforded it he would have had it raining cats and dogs instead. With The Master many have concluded that Phoenix, Hoffman and Adams represent the id, the ego and the super-ego in Freud’s psychic apparatus. Perhaps, but the film can be enjoyed simply for what it is – a well-acted film with some of Anderson’s most dazzling camerawork to date.

Music has been an integral part of all of Anderson’s films and here Jonny Greenwood’s great score is augmented with classic songs of the day including Jo Stafford’s “No Other Love” and a charmingly unexpected “Slow Boat to China” sung by one of the principals. As a bonus we get The Bad Seed’s Patty McCormack as an old woman who wakes from Hoffman’s hypnosis in a giddy state.

The film is beautifully photographed in 70mm, the first film to be shot in the super widescreen process in some time.

Anderson’s constantly moving camera is reminiscent of the films of one of his influences, the great Jean Renoir, whose 1946 film, The Diary of a Chambermaid has coincidentally been released on Blu-ray and standard DVD at the same time as The Master.

Renoir, son of the legendary impressionist painter, inherited his father’s eye for beautiful images of which The Diary of a Chambermaid has more than its share.

Paulette Goddard was never a great actress, but she was a highly competent one, and more to the point of the film, she was a ravishingly beautiful one. In this film, adapted from a famous 19th Century novel, she plays a maid who uses her beauty to her advantage in moving up in the world. As she puts it, she wants to become a “mistress”, double entendre scandalously implied in a mid-40s Hollywood film.

The film, which was produced by Goddard and her then husband, Burgess Meredith, was not so kind to the latter. He plays a middle-aged idiot, albeit one with money. Although second billed, his unbearable character is thankfully off screen for most of the film. The heavy lifting, aside from Goddard, is done by Francis Lederer as an acid-tongued valet; Hurd Hatfield as the sickly son of the master and mistress of the house and his parents played by Reginald Owen and Judith Anderson. Anderson is particularly effective as deluded faded aristocrat who pimps Goddard out to her son. The film’s most famous set piece is the town brawl that serves as the film’s climax, which has to be seen to be believed.

Luis Bunuel remade the film in 1964 with Jeanne Moreau in a decidedly more risqué version, which has long been available on DVD.

New releases this week include Wreck-It Ralph and The Intouchables.