My first experience of a Paul Thomas Anderson film on the big screen was this one and I’ll never forget how spellbound I was by his lush Panavision visuals, his atonal and often unnerving soundtrack, his uncompromising approach to the nonjudgmental character study and his ability to make relatable even the most intolerable of characters. In the back of the theater showing arguably the great director’s one meta effort in his oeuvre I could hear the disappointed grumblings of Adam Sandler fans who bought a ticket to something so inherently director driven as opposed to star driven that they couldn’t help but abandon their seats. The so-called Adam Sandler movie and the legion of dedicated followers of his Happy Madison bro comedies didn’t know how to take the Best Director winner of the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, many of whom still don’t. That this transitional work functioning as an answer to the Happy Madison movies was followed up by the fearsome Academy Award winner There Will Be Blood only serves to cement the director’s status as the most chameleonic master of the cinematic medium since Stanley Kubrick.

Unfortunately it came and went with only staunch cinephiles being among the admirers before quietly leaving theaters and hitting DVD in a director-approved two-disc special edition. In the years since however, it is regarded as a modestly scaled masterpiece in a oeuvre dominated by towering achievements, making it the one true lark of Paul Thomas Anderson’s illustrious career. If nothing else, it will be remembered as the film that got Daniel-Day Lewis to accept the part of Daniel Plainview in

. Years after the

laserdisc, being the one time the director worked with The Criterion Collection, the long awaited high-definition release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s

has officially become the second collaboration with Criterion in a newly restored transfer supervised by the director as well as porting over all the extras from the two-disc DVD as well as a wealth of new extras including the Cannes Film Festival press conference. After over ten years of waiting,

gets the elite special edition treatment. Was it worth the wait?