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"It would be wrong to say that P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love is the Adam Sandler movie for people who hate Adam Sandler movies. (Though that sentiment definitely applies to me.) For one, Anderson is an ardent fan of Sandler’s work, and conceived this 90-minute comedy around him as a downshift—in scope, if not ambition—from Anderson’s operatic opus Magnolia. But more importantly, Anderson succeeds in capturing Sandler’s essence in a way that none of his star vehicles ever could. In Punch-Drunk Love, all those qualities that comprise the Sandler persona—the simpleton’s innocence, the pained inarticulateness, the propensity for violence—have been sharpened and magnified. (Fortunately, Anderson had the good sense to excise Sandler’s blue-collar posturing altogether.) It’s a uniquely unsettling experience: Dark, tightly wound, and disturbingly arrhythmic, yet sweet and disarming, too, with more authentic feeling than anything else in Sandler’s filmography."