Martin Scorsese makes movies that seem fueled by the adrenaline of passion. Terrence Malick’s films seem to float on the evanescence of sense memory.

And Paul Thomas Anderson? Given the evidence of “The Master” and his last film, “There Will Be Blood,” I’d offer this: Anderson seems bent on making movies that challenge the viewer to figure out what he’s really about.

“The Master” feels as though it were constructed from all the stuff cut out of another, richer movie. You get the feeling from “The Master” (as you did from “There Will Be Blood”) that, somewhere, there is a bigger, more fulfilling picture that Anderson isn’t revealing. Instead, he focuses on a character tangential to the main story, showing us only his glimpses of the central action. (More…)