Phantom Thread, at its heart, is about control—the lengths we will go to grasp it and who we choose to yield it to. Luckily, control is what Paul Thomas Anderson does best. Don’t let the first half of this movie, which pretends to be about a fashion designer (Daniel Day-Lewis, brilliant for, supposedly, the last time here) who takes in a young waitress turned model (Vicky Krieps, brilliant for the first time here), fool you—Anderson is spinning a fiendish yarn, with surprises so dark they make 2017’s other provocateurs, Darren Aronofsky and Yorgos Lanthimos, look like rank amateurs.

The Greatest Showman has all the razzle dazzle you’d expect, but was as fake as the original circus P.T. Barnum put together. The film was too short to tackle the complexities of the Barnum story, using catchy tunes to distract from the fact that there was no real story. While the song with Zac Efron and Hugh Jackman was the duet we never knew we needed, the music was not enough to carry the film and the fact that they abandoned character development and plot. Even at the height of conflict, the film failed to be ‘the greatest show’.