Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a washed up, ex-revolutionary, living off the grid with his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti).  Sixteen years prior, his partner in crime and in life, Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) was captured by the police and turned in the names of The French 75, forcing Bob to go into hiding.  In all that time, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) pursued the revolutionary organization and has now set his sights on Bob.  Luring him out by kidnapping Willa, Bob must reintegrate into a world that has moved on without him but whose mission to dismantle white supremacy has remained steadfast and clear, and may be more vital now than ever. 

Writer/Director Paul Thomas Anderson returns to the font of novelist Thomas Pynchon, delivering One Battle After Another for Warner Brothers.  Running 161 minutes, the film affords Anderson his largest budget to date, and in return, he crafts a wildly entertaining political action/thriller and his most market-friendly title that may reach beyond the four walls of the art house, even if his previous Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice (2014), remains a hotly contested line on his filmography. 

The film opens with Perfidia casing an immigration detention facility late one afternoon, and come dusk, she and her team break in, hold hostage the guards, liberates the detainees, all while she humiliates Lockjaw, though it is not a misstep in Penn’s performance that we get a sense that perhaps Lockjaw is equally thrilled to be in this precise predicament.  Anderson starts this film off on a high note, and there is a maturity in his filmmaking here where a younger Anderson may have been tempted to try it as a one-shot during the liberation of the detention facility.  With that being said, he is still not one who is quick to cut, and with Michael Bauman behind the camera and Andy Jurgensen in the editing suite, the film is expertly paced and there are times that even when the camera does cut it still moves with the same propulsive fluidity as if it were an unbroken long take. What is even more impressive is that the energy level never dips and it is because on the page, Anderson has practiced the golden rule that each scene must have some conflict that rises and falls so that as soon as we land on our feet from one conflict we are tripping into the next; quite literally, it is one battle after another. 

Returning from looking at the film from a distance to focus back on Anderson’s opening gambit, he directs Taylor in a simply radiant role, and she commands the screen in a new and exciting way.  The opening is paced and cut like an extended montage, and this first act takes up a good forty-five minutes or so, operating almost listlessly in that the audiences is kept at bay from the true shape of the story. Taylor’s performance is calibrated in such a way, however, that we are learning so much about the world view that Anderson has entered into this film with and we are never less than intrigued.  In lesser hands, the role of Perfidia would swallow the performer whole because she has such a thin throughline and is not afforded the chance to really build upon it given the pacing of this first act; Taylor tells us so much with a look, an action, or an inflection.  She has a devil may care attitude, but she is fiercely devoted to her cause and watching her on screen, we believe along with her that she truly is invincible.  That feeling is why when the chinks in the armor do begin to show, it feels so devastating because we do still have the benefit of an omniscient viewer while her character is not afforded that same mile-high understand of the situation as her luck begins to sour.  From a painful and guttural, seconds long scene as Perfidia is in the throes of postpartum depression, to a bank heist gone wrong, and an aerial view police chase like nothing Anderson has committed to film yet before – a common theme across One Battle After Another – our time with Perfidia is soon coming to a close in absolute chaos as Bob – still going by his French 75 name, Ghetto Pat – runs away under cover of night with his daughter to ensure their safety. 

Anderson slows the pace down a little as we recalibrate ourselves for the second act.  Sixteen years have passed and Willa, now grown, is taking a moment of peace in the garden before the school dance.  Unbeknownst to her, a helicopter flies over head, and we, from Bauman’s camera lens still down on the ground look up in an inversion of that shot earlier which we saw Perfidia being apprehended and taken away from us signaling that a similar fate may soon be in store for the daughter.  It is a rather clean changing of gears for the film that soon opens up to be much more comic, allowing for DiCaprio to really show off his timing, but not before allowing us to spend a decent amount of time with Perfidia and her friends, a wildly modern cohort.  We get a great look at the strange dynamic between father and daughter, both strong willed but with a generational and experienced divide that proves insurmountable to span despite best efforts on both sides.  In high school, she is beginning to branch out and forge her own path, and while One Battle After Another is never as directly volatile as Daniel Goldhaber‘s How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023), it does a great job at capturing the similarities and differences in the actions of youth resistance today.  There is an urgency present not just because both causes are fights against injustice, but there is also the looming threat towards our direct future and a sense that time may be running out that informs the activism of today. 

With DiCaprio filling out his leading role in the middle of the film, the allusions towards Inherent Vice become unmistakable in the Pynchon, Anderson, and bumbling gum-shoe of it all, yet the two films could not be more different despite sharing a similar style of humor, albeit slightly more refined and polished here.  It is not the first time DiCaprio is taking on this kind of role with his turn as Rick Dalton in Quinten Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood (2019) coming to mind both because of the comedic nature and the washed up has been elements, but it cannot be said that the actor is drawing from the same bag of tricks given the respective directors’ distinct sensibilities.  As for his comedic timing, we see flashes of his character work in Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) in which he played the role of Jordan Belfort with a specific mania that can only be harnessed by those both young enough to have no inhibitions, yet all the money in the world needed to fuel their wild vices.  Coming to set with that history, DiCaprio blends the two performances with a new maturity, very much in step with his director who is also charting us through a new era of his career as a filmmaker. 

It could be said that, despite Bob’s antics, he remains the straight man of this narrative as he tries breaking back into a world that he had all but left behind.  As a salve to Bob’s frantic energy is Sergio (Benicio del Toro), Willa’s sensei and the conductor of, in his own words, something on a Latino Underground Railroad.  Embodying the perfect essence of a supporting character, del Toro brings such a wave of calm over the narrative even though Jurgensen’s edit never slows, as Anderson once more executes a pitch perfect turning over of the reins with these characters in this brief interlude.  In much the same way the opening act of the film was led by Taylor’s Perfidia, this early-middle belongs to del Toro who will seamlessly yield later to Infiniti’s Willa as she is pursued by an ever-angrier Lockjaw. 

In this late middle section, One Battle ever so slightly slips out of Anderson’s otherwise steady grasp, but not enough to derail the whole affair.  The issue is that it requires a larger recalibration than any of the other act breaks have because we find ourselves separated from Bob for the longest stretch of time here.  That is not to say that this section is any less well conceived and crafted, it is simply a major shift in narrative space where we have very few anchor points to hold on to.  This section really allows Infiniti room to grow her character and lay the groundwork for her evolution in the final act yet to come, and also more fully introduces us to the main antagonist of the film; The Christmas Adventurers. 

Introduced earlier on in the film with a fitting yet nevertheless jarring needle drop of The Ramsey Lewis Trio’s “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?,” this shadowy organization of the eccentric, elderly, and elite are looking at Lockjaw to fill a recent opening within their ranks.  It is not an accident that Anderson names this white supremacy group with such a goofy name because he is absolutely making fun of them.  From the fantasy inspired nomenclature used in the leadership ranks of the Klan, to more presently the meme-able behavior that has leaked out about the Proud Boys, while yes, these people are unfortunately dangerous to society, they are also… really weird?  To that end, while Anderson is merciless in showing just how buffoonish their entire philosophy is, he never once lets them appear anything other than calculated, precise, and lethal.   

Viewed from a wider lens, and similar to how some of the events in James Gunn’s Superman (2025) are eerily similar to the headlines of the news cycle of its release window, so too does Anderson’s latest have a few chilling moments of art imitating life.  As Donald Trump continues his federalization of the National Guard while looking to pick a fight with Democratic-led cities, Lockjaw tells his team to give him a reason to invade Baktan Cross and under the guise of an immigration and D.E.A. raid, the full force of federal law enforcement now acts as one man’s personal army fighting for personal gains.  Even beyond the opening images of a chain link immigration detention facility with humans huddles under blankets, this plot mechanic of Lockjaw commandeering an entire arm of the National Guard in any other time may be seen as a bridge too far for believable fiction, but unfortunately, with a government openly breaking laws as part of their policy, the line between satirical fiction and reality is becoming blurred with each new headline.  

One Battle After Another is an achievement, not only within Anderson’s filmography, but also in filmmaking as a whole.  It is packed full of themes while also playing like a riotous rescue mission just a few jokes shy of an all-out farce.  On the page, the film marks a blending of various interests that have come in and out of the limelight across Anderson’s career, and on the screen, there is ample opportunity for Anderson to indulge in his bravado streak that make every new release from the director an event and so fun to plumb the depths of nuance upon the guaranteed revisits.  Here, that scene occurs late in the film on the dusty Texas Dip off of highway 78 as time stands still while we follow three cars, almost never in frame together, up and down the endlessly disorienting hills.  A car chase in slow motion, yet the tension is at an all-time high; this oxymoron is the perfect showstopping moment for a film that continually defies and exceeds our expectations across its runtime leaving us awash in awe of the unbelievable feat which we are watching. One Battle After Another is a masterclass in Anderson as it has all of the gravitas of The Will Be Blood (2007), but dressed down with the freewheeling nature of Inherent Vice, the acidity of Phantom Thread (2017), and the mile-a-minute energy of Licorice Pizza (2021). It is a film that will not only commandeer the moment but enchant those interested in the shared reflections between film and the era they arrived on screen for decades to come. It may seem rote at this point to call each new Paul Thomas Anderson feature a modern masterpiece, but few titles more immediately deserve such heralding as One Battle After Another.