Among the several delights in Paul Thomas Anderson’s consistently surprising new movie Phantom Thread is its incisive explication of how fragile masculinity can be. Daniel Day Lewis, in what he has announced will be his final film role, plays Reynolds, a couture designer in 1950s London, whose world is propped up by the fleet of women he employs. Along comes a muse, Alma (Vicky Krieps) who challenges his ritualistic way of life and teases out the fetishistic extents of his relationship with power. The trailer makes it look like some sort of a thriller, but Phantom Thread is a romance that is funny more often than not—of all the films in PTA’s oeuvre, it shares the most with 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love [ . . . ]

More: The Phantom Thread’s Lesley Manville Talks Range and Fragile Masculinity