DOUBLE BILL! "I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!" It’s double-trouble for pious landowners and Nevada gamblers when we screen director Paul Thomas Anderson’s iconic tale of a monstrous oilman, There Will Be Blood, and the filmmaker’s first feature Hard Eight (aka Sidney).

Daniel Day Lewis gives an Oscar-winning performance as Daniel Plainview, a turn of the century prospector who discovers oil in Los Angeles. Repulsed by his fellow-man, Plainview will stop at nothing to expand his wealth in an effort to shut himself off from the world. Featuring breathtaking (Oscar winning) cinematography by Robert Elswit, a score by Jonny Greenwood as relentless as the film’s protagonist and a thoroughly pitiful Paul Dano as Plainview’s nemesis, 2022 marks the film’s 15th anniversary – just as PTA looks poised to win his own Oscar for Licorice Pizza.

Originally disowned by PTA when the film was recut and retitled by a now defunct studio (karma much?) Hard Eight follows a hardened gambler (Philip Baker Hall, who later stared in the filmmaker’s Boogie Nights as Floyd Gondoli and Magnolia as Jimmy Gator) who takes a loser (John C. Reilly) under his wing to teach him the tricks of the trade. Featuring a rising Gwyneth Paltrow, the evergreen Samuel L. Jackson and appearances by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert (“The Colonel”) Ridgely, this is a rare opportunity to enjoy the filmmaker’s first film.