If Jean-Luc Godard had been thirty in 2000, and if he'd lived in Los Angeles instead of Switzerland, maybe he'd have made Magnolia. By which I mean to suggest that here is a picture that seems to know the lessons made available in the New Wave years and aware of how much they might revive the vitality of American pictures. So Magnolia (a neighborhood) is a collection of stories that meet in the editing machine and in the generous imagination of Paul Thomas Anderson. No, these are not sweet or comfortable lives for the most part, and I realize that frogs do not often fall from the sky (except as a startling magic), but tell me how many of these lives seem “wrong,” and ask yourself whether ensemble acting has ever been as rich. Magnolia is the living proof that there are still great pictures to be made in L.A.