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If American moviemaking has a wunderkind these days, it would be Paul Thomas Anderson. At only 29 years old, Anderson has turned out three complex and singular films in three years: Hard Eight, a tale of gambling and redemption in Reno; Boogie Nights, which dared to be sympathetic to pornographers; and now Magnolia, a technically dazzling pastiche filled with star power (Tom Cruise, Jason Robards) and highly accomplished performances from actors who have appeared in all of Anderson's movies, including Philip Baker Hall and John C. Reilly. But while the three-hour-long Magnolia, which continues the recent tradition of lengthy serious films, is impressive, there's one unsettling fact about it.

Spiritually and structurally, this is almost a note-for-note recapitulation of director Robert Altman's 1993 dazzler, Short Cuts. There's the same California locale, the broad cast, the interrelated stories, even a shared apocalyptic denouement. In Short Cuts the catastrophe was an earthquake, which is entirely plausible in Southern California. Anderson has chosen a far more biblical climax—and an openly absurd one—but still the parallels are too numerous to ignore. (And this isn't just one critic's carping. Of the half-dozen people who attended the screening I saw, everyone had the same reaction: "Hey, why did he remake Short Cuts?")

Of course, if you are a hotshot young American filmmaker, there are far worse people to ape than Robert Altman—the Altman of the 1970s and early '90s, that is. And when you have such sure-handed control of filmmaking technique as Anderson does, even a blatant homage like Magnolia is still miles ahead of any work from directors in the same age bracket, especially when you consider that Anderson also wrote the script, which interweaves a group of disparate lives over the course of a single day in the San Fernando Valley.

Magnolia makes a grab for your attention from the get-go, with a series of highly stylized vignettes which show how fate works in mysterious ways in all times and all places, from Victorian London to mid-century California. The vignettes are so pointed and funny that what follows is inevitably a letdown, as the parallels to Altman's work quickly become apparent. But what keeps your interest are the powerful performances that Anderson elicits from his actors, especially the two biggest names on the bill.

Robards plays a wealthy man dying of cancer; Cruise plays his son, who makes his living as a particularly revolting sort of motivational speaker. Robards was actually seriously ill when he played the part of Earl Partridge, a former game-show tycoon estranged from his only son, so his work here goes way beyond Method. You can read every seam in the actor's makeup-free face while he plays all his lines flat on his back. Earl Partridge is profane, desperate, and sympathetic, as is his wife, played by Julianne Moore, who offers yet another performance without a false note.

As Frank Mackey, who essentially teaches men how to be sexual predators, Cruise goes 180 degrees from his repressed doctor of Eyes Wide Shut. It's a flamboyant, blustery turn, one that plays wittily with the actor's "nice guy" public persona—if you can't imagine Tom Cruise threatening to kick dogs, his work in Magnolia will open your eyes.

Anderson's repertory players give a solid underpinning to the star turns. As Jimmy Gator, longtime host of a Partridge quiz show called What Do Kids Know?, Hall slowly reveals the confused monster beneath Gator's avuncular public image. Reilly, who starred with Hall in Hard Eight, is completely believable as Officer Jim Kurring, a cop who falls in love with Jimmy Gator's estranged daughter, Claudia (Melora Walters). And Philip Seymour Hoffman, who by law must now appear in every other film, is sweetly convincing as Earl Partidge's private-duty nurse.

Playing what is surely the most off-kilter role in Magnolia, William H. Macy is Donnie Smith, former star of What Do Kids Know?, whose life was ruined by his early success. Donnie has many problems, including an inability to hold the simplest of jobs, or to face up to his most basic urges. Macy gets to play a memorable game of emotional cat-and-mouse in a bar with one of the stars of Altman's Nashville, Henry Gibson.

But what it all comes down to is a puzzlement, especially late in the film, when Anderson introduces what I will discretely call the amphibian motif. Filled with sharply sketched performances, tightly scripted, shot and edited with absolute assurance, Magnolia, because of its obvious debt to Short Cuts, ultimately comes off as the most ambitious student film ever.