Mike A.’s review published on Letterboxd:
I first saw this during its theatrical run--on my birthday, if I remember right--and today I feel the same way about it as I did then, a lifetime ago. That's rare for me: I've been through so many phases as a cinephile, each one involving much rethinking and visceral rewiring, that very few movies carry the feel of my first viewing of them.
I imagine that every serious, active, critical movie lover has films that they cherish without ignoring their many flaws. Boogie Nights has a lot of blunt, obvious dialogue; it beats most of its many competitors on the Scorsese-biting score; and its director's choice of the porn industry as setting for a warmhearted family narrative is curious, to say the least.
At the end of the day, though, this is a dynamic, thrilling movie. The casting is superb, the characterization is vivid, the drama hits home on an intimate level even as the film spans years and presents a detailed cultural panorama. Anderson has a superb control of rhythm and pacing. His movie has a wonderful kinetic power but can still accommodate moments of slow, suspenseful development: Jack's first meeting with Eddie, the painfully sad scene where he abandons The Colonel, and, most brilliantly, the harrowing coke rip-off climax.
What I love most about Boogie Nights--and I see this in a lot of first and second films by directors--is the way you can sense so many different bits of inspiration joined together, dovetailing or bouncing off each other. There's the documentary/interview motif, and the way it's used to chart moral decline in the story arc; the use of cock rock culture as a complement to cocaine addiction; the linked chain of the three violent set pieces near the end, each of them ringing with authenticity and a strong sense of particularity.
Anderson's film is full of beautiful long takes and detailed widescreen mise en scene, but it draws so much of its power from juxtaposition. Characters and settings collide and separate, songs establish and then contradict mood, fragments of time and space are brought together in beautiful harmony. It's cinema as orchestra music.
And, lastly, speaking of music: the way this movie treats the 80s is just bang-on. The decade's arrival with a murder-suicide; the switch from bell bottoms to jacket sleeves hiked up to the elbows (I can't believe I actually used to do that!); the avalanche of coke; the whole ugly ball of excess and greed...It's perfect, and the transition from disco and funk to shit-ass poodle hair music is the finest touch. The 90s, when i was a teenager, were a period of scorn for the preceding decade--the music and fashion were disdained, even suppressed from cultural memory. Sitting in the theatre and hearing "Sister Christian" and "Jesse's Girl" was a shock, and their employment during a scene of slowly building dread was just amazing. In retrospect, the soundtrack may have been one of the first cracks in the floodgate: soon afterwards, 80s nostalgia would emerge, and, appallingly to my mind, we're still living with it today. But we have Boogie Nights, with its coke comedowns, red leather and shitty videotape, to remind us just how awful that decade really was.