And you thought Anne-Katrin Titze only wrote about West Nile Virus and endangered birds in Prospect Park. No, she’s a film critic, too. And she wrote a rave review of The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s tour de force starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams, for a British website called Eye for Film.

Seconds into the film, The Master director Paul Thomas Anderson already has a firm grip on you. His tour de force picture references an entire Hollywood archive of Second World War and post-war movies without a single explicit quote, because the archive is in our common pool of war imagery, manufactured by cinema.

And then Anderson turns those expectations on their head, and gives us the private side of the coin – the memories of grandparents, the faded family photos of Aunt Doris from Norway, the representations of a presumed reality that always mingles with the shared movie memory

In the beginning, there was water. The turquoise sea crests with white foam as watched from above, from a ship, perhaps. Then we see Joaquin Phoenix’s head in a steel helmet, partly hidden, crouching in a boat. And the audience begins to anticipate. D-day? Omaha Beach? A battle at sea?

The film will be playing in 70mm at the Clearview Ziegfeld starting Friday. It’s currently playing in 70mm at the Village East Cinema in the East Village.