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Stars: Thom Yorke, Dajana Roncione, Frida Dam Seidel, Joseba Yerro Izaguirre, Jean Michael Sinisterra Munoz, Takuya Fujisawa | Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

In between feature films Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson directed a 15-minute musical film that was released on Netflix in June 2019. This accompaniment to Thom Yorke’s titular album opens with a journey through the subway, where many passengers wearing dark-coloured clothes struggle to stay awake before a synchronized dance routine unfolds.

What unfolds is a mind-bending piece focusing on Yorke, escaping the subway setting to depict phenomenal visuals while employing dream logic so effectively. Shadows and lighting are expertly used to paint a visually stunning picture, gorgeously utilizing colour in ways which make the screen pop so vividly.

Also effectively utilized is the physical prowess of the performers, using Charlie Chaplin-style physicality to bring alive this tale about workers who no longer have control over their own bodies.

Paul Thomas Anderson is reuniting with his Radiohead cohorts.

The Oscar-winning auteur helms Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s latest music video for band The Smile along with Tom Skinner. The Smile’s new track “Wall of Eyes” is from the eponymous album, set to be released January 26 by Xl Recordings.

Anderson directs the trippy black-and-white music video for “Wall of Eyes,” which centers on Yorke wandering through London. Yorke is shown alone in a pub, staring at a literal wall of eyeballs with a Lynchian twist, and later among dozens of versions of himself. The music video was filmed on location at The Mildmay Club and on the streets of London, England from October 24 to 26, 2023.

“Wall of Eyes” also features strings by The London Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Hugh Brunt. The video is produced by Sara Murphy, Erica Frauman, and Shirley O’Connor, with Andy Jurgensen editing.

Anderson previously directed...

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke released his third solo album “Anima” on June 27, but he didn’t release it alone. It was accompanied by a Netflix short film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The 15-minute film — really an extended music video — features three songs from the album: “Not the News,” “Traffic” and “Dawn Chorus.” It follows Yorke as a train commuter in search of a woman (his real-life partner Dajana Roncione) through a strange, dream-like landscape. Indeed, dream-like is how a lot of critics are describing the album. Or nightmarish. Or both.

As of this writing the album has a MetaCritic score of 85 based on eight reviews counted so far — all of them positive. Reviewers say it’s haunted by “dreams, nightmares and sleepwalking,” “an artfully produced fever dream of an album” on which Yorke sounds “anxious, helpless, enraged.” “Anima” contains “little hope,” but its “the darkest and tenderest music he has released outside of Radiohead.

Thom Yorke describes his excellent new solo album Anima as “dystopian,” which isn’t exactly the hugest surprise in the world. With or without Radiohead, he’s spent his whole career mapping out the dystopia we’re living in—he does futuristic apocalypse the way John Fogerty does choogle. Yorke could have spent the entire record freestyling new verses for “Old Town Road” and it still would have turned out dystopian. But nobody could accuse him of overreacting. At a moment when the world is in even scarier shape than...

“Anima,” the rapturous and spellbinding Paul Thomas Anderson “one-reeler” that Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke (and Netflix) have commissioned to help promote his new album of the same name, feels as essential as anything the “Phantom Thread” director has ever done. At least on first blush. It’s also, in its own beguiling way, the next logical step in what has become one of recent history’s most rewarding partnerships between a filmmaker and a group of musicians. This 15-minute short is nothing less than a dream come true.

Yorke — now four LPs deep into a twitchy and feral solo career that includes the score for Luca Guadagnino’s recent “Suspiria” remake — has long alternated between raging against the madness of the modern world, and surrendering to it in some kind of narcotic stupor. One song offers a snarling “fuck you” to the drone-like middle managers who turn their corporate offices...