There are two ways of assessing the quality of a film: one is subtractive and the other is additive.

The first assesses how many errors have been eliminated.

The second assesses how much the film really does, i.e. how much vision it loads onto the experience or the artistic statement.

While trying to call Boogie Nights a better film than Inherent Vice I realized that it is sort of an apples-and-oranges comparison, from my point-of-view. Boogie Nights forcefully imprints tons and tons of experience on the viewer. It has massive ambition and imagination. Inherent Vice is the product of a more refined director -- a cleaner-cut vision, restricted but skillfully focused. Boogie Nights inherits a whole world of ideas and perhaps flails a bit on the outer edges but ends up giving an explosive experience and a terrific reward.

Inherent Vice eliminates error on a narrow vision; Boogie Nights strives for everything. The former one could call an undeniably good film, in principle. The latter is a more subjective assessment.