‘One Battle After Another’ is the movie of the year

Warner Bros.’ latest, the Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle “One Battle After Another,” might be their biggest gamble of the year. It’s the last picture they plan to release in 2025, and they’ve put all their chips on writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson, a renowned filmmaker beloved for everything about his work outside of his inability to deliver a true hit.

Inspired by the 1990 novel “Vineland” by Thomas Pynchon, the film concerns a retired revolutionary (DiCaprio) being hunted by the government and separated from his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti). Alleged to be even costlier than “Mickey 17,” the studio’s biggest flop so far this year, the film has a budget significantly larger than the global box office haul of Anderson’s most successful film, “There Will Be Blood.” Telegraphed to be loudly political in divisive times, the prospect of spending superhero movie money on a large-scale arthouse film seemed, on paper, to be a curious move especially given that Anderson’s last absolute “flop,” “Inherent Vice,” was also adapted from a Pynchon novel. There were even questions about what Anderson was cooking that needed such a big asking price to produce.

After this spring’s early foibles, Warner Bros. broke records this year, having seven successive releases top the box office with $40 million or more. It’s become a running gag that this unwieldy, costly experiment from one of our greatest living filmmakers would break the streak. 

Having seen it, “One Battle After Another” doesn’t have to do numbers. It is so soundly, devastatingly, and unequivocally the movie of the year that we’re all going to spend the rest of 2025 talking about it, no matter what.

As a filmmaker, Anderson has spent the last 20 years making period pieces and telling stories about our past. But “One Battle After Another” is a vital and thrilling depiction of our present, a sprawling epic that is as thematically incendiary as it is exhilarating to watch.

The film opens sixteen years ago with an instantly iconic set piece following the French 75, a group of revolutionaries (or, as the opposition calls them, domestic terrorists) liberating an ICE detention camp. It’s a diverse group of operatives, but the action focuses on “Ghetto” Pat (DiCaprio), the resident explosives expert who also goes by “The Rocketman,” and his lover Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), an enigmatic woman who comes from a long line of revolutionaries. During the op, Perfidia encounters Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a military officer in charge of the camp, and the two immediately lock into a complex game of cat and mouse. 

Perfidia asserts her dominance over Lockjaw in the act of subduing and restraining him, and the sexually charged nature of the interaction causes him to imprint upon her — a racist and violent white man obsessed with possessing a fierce and unbossed Black woman. But Perfidia herself finds power in the primal hold she has over him, relishing the capacity to entrance the enemy even through his own grotesque bigotry.

As their game unfolds, Perfidia gets pregnant, which leads to “Ghetto” Pat wanting to settle down and abandon the revolution for fatherhood. Perfidia, struggling with postpartum depression, ups the ante, and a heist to fund their mission goes wrong. She gets caught, and everything falls apart. It’s a significant credit to Taylor’s astonishing work in this role that she leaves the screen a third of the way through, yet her presence is felt so vividly for the rest of the picture.

Anderson frames Taylor’s Perfidia through several perspectives, from Lockjaw’s lascivious gaze, through her comrades who are equally in awe of her fearlessness and frightened of her recklessness, and through a more objective viewpoint where we see her almost as the platonic ideal of a revolutionary, a beautiful, forceful woman shouting invective into a payphone about the abortion ban after setting off a bomb near the lawmakers. It’s that complex web tying racist oppression and fetishistic yearning together that drives the film.

In the present day, hiding out under the name Bob Ferguson with their daughter Willa (Infiniti),  the man formerly known as “Ghetto Pat” is now a drug-addled alcoholic just trying to do right by his daughter, absent the guiding hand of her absent mother. Their peaceful, if paranoid, existence is interrupted when Lockjaw renews his interest in going after the rest of the French 75. His mission was spurred on by being invited to join a clandestine organization of powerful white men called the Christmas Adventurers Club. 

The organization is eager to have such a violent and dedicated man in its ranks and at its disposal. Still, the club’s members must be certain that rumors of his predilection for dark skinned women are only that…rumors.

Thus, the film’s thrust is a successive marathon of mad scrambles for freedom, car chases, and a vivid portrait of the division, graft, and deep-seated hatred at the core of the American experiment.

At two hours and forty-two minutes, one would think such a rich and layered tale could be a slog, but it whips by with such pop art proficiency. It feels like the kind of film only Anderson could make, utilizing VistaVision cameras to capture big, bold images and staging the action with a sharp eye.

A great piece of lore surrounds Anderson and how he dropped out of film school very early. In a 1997 interview with Charlie Rose, he spoke of being offended at the professor starting the class by saying, “If you’re here to make Terminator 2, then just leave now.” Anderson was not specifically there to learn how to make a science fiction actioner about robots from the future, but the pretension bristled him enough to abandon the program entirely. Over the years, in other interviews, he’s been known to casually champion films some might consider “lowbrow” relative to his stature among cinephiles. (His professed love for “Girls Trip” might be why he cast Regina Hall here as a fellow member of the French 75. That or them being irl neighbors.)

So, it’s such a joy to watch a director create something that so wonderfully bridges the gap between the sort of film fan who reads Pynchon and the one who loves the truck chase from “Terminator 2.” The movie is genuinely exhilarating in its pacing, but still has room for the texture of the drama and the necessary release of its comedic beats. DiCaprio gives a heartfelt turn for the father/daughter arc of the picture, but is otherwise the funniest he’s ever been on screen. He has exceptional chemistry with Benicio Del Toro, who plays Willa’s martial arts instructor, Sergio, also known as “Sensei.” Bob turns to him for help only to discover he runs an “underground railroad” for undocumented folks in their town. Their relationship in the film captures the camaraderie and selflessness of the revolution, while also yielding no shortage of laugh-out-loud moments. The funnier bits are necessary to prevent all the moral carnage on display from making the viewer so sick to their stomach that they walk out of the theater.

Anderson’s depiction of nastiness in American politics never feels sensationalized for dramatic effect. The white supremacists in the Christmas Adventurers Club aren’t mustache-twirling villains chewing the scenery while spewing hateful bile. Instead, they converse so casually, employing an overabundance of politeness to make their racial purity talk sound indistinguishable from a kindergarten teacher imparting cleanliness expectations to a group of children. There’s also something inspired about casting world-renowned swirler Tony Goldwyn, President Fitz from “Scandal,” as one of their key members.

Anderson never lets the plight of the undocumented populace slip from the audience’s memory, maintaining a kind of omnipresence at the periphery of the narrative that is at once haunting and damning. But by centering the underlying, fetishistic rot within the opposition, he cuts to the core of our national nightmare. It’s all in Penn’s performance as Lockjaw, a cartoonish caricature one minute, openly inviting our laughter at his buffoonish hypocrisy, then the next, a blunt object of hatred, chilling in his persistence and lack of self-awareness. There’s something so pathetic about him, brushing up against eliciting genuine sympathy for how larger forces use him like a tool. 

But once you toe up to that line, you get close enough to see how badly his type wants to be the useful idiot. Lockjaw would rather deny the nagging parts of himself that, though ultimately a perversion, might open his eyes to a world outside of his bigotry. All that matters to him is being in the “in” group. 

In the end, after all the running, fighting, pushing, and pulling, the film really shows two hidden networks opposing one another. One pulls the strings beneath the surface to exalt a select few, manipulating those outside of their inner circle to harm others for a chance to be special. The other is a vast and diverse community of folks helping each other, risking themselves for the greater good, and centering love for one another above all else.

A lot of digital ink will be spilled in the coming months unpacking and debating the thornier side of the film’s themes, unpacking all the intricacies of its politics. But above all else, this is one of the most politically fiery movies released from a major studio in ages, and it feels like a Herculean feat for something to tackle these issues and these ideas while still remaining so entertaining and so intoxicating to behold on the big screen.

“One Battle After Another” will leave you spent, but hopeful. It is an exhausting and inspiring motion picture.

“One Battle After Another” opens exclusively in theaters nationwide this Friday, September 26th.