One Battle After Another

Revolutions get old, and so do revolutionaries. One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2025 epic, opens in the glory days of the French 75, a radical cell liberating detention centers with Perfidia Beverly Hills at the trigger and Bob Ferguson on the explosives. Sixteen years later the cell is scattered, Perfidia is gone, and Bob is a paranoid stoner dad in a bathrobe raising their teenage daughter Willa off the grid. When Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, the obsessive military man their old operation humiliated, resurfaces with federal power and a personal vendetta, Bob has to shake off a decade and a half of weed and grief to save the one thing he didn’t burn.

Reception reached a pitch Anderson had never quite hit before. Long celebrated as a master who made films for the devoted, he delivered his most accessible picture at blockbuster scale, and the response, from critics, audiences, and fellow filmmakers alike, treated it as an event, with many calling it the best American film of the decade so far. Dissent exists at the margins, aimed at runtime, tonal audacity, and politics worn openly. It did little to slow the consensus.

DiCaprio in a Bathrobe, Penn on the Warpath

DiCaprio gives one of the loosest, funniest performances of his career as Bob, a man whose revolutionary muscle memory has decayed into pure flinch. Viewers latch onto the running gag of a rescue hotline he can’t use because he’s forgotten the passphrase, screaming into a landline while history closes in, and the performance balances slapstick panic with real paternal ferocity. Around him, Anderson builds an ensemble at full wattage. Chase Infiniti, in her film debut as Willa, emerged as the year’s breakout, holding the emotional center while the movie detonates around her. Benicio del Toro glides through as Sensei Sergio, a karate instructor and community fixer whose unflappable calm makes every scene funnier, and Teyana Taylor burns as Perfidia, whose contradictions haunt the entire film.

Then there’s Lockjaw. Sean Penn plays the colonel as a knotted slab of thwarted desire and racial obsession, jaw grinding, posture wrong, a man pursuing membership in a white supremacist secret society while hiding what he wants most. Audiences describe the performance as simultaneously hilarious and skin-crawling, a villain of genuine menace built from pathetic parts, and many called it Penn’s best work in decades.

Anderson stages it all with old-Hollywood scale, shooting in VistaVision and releasing to 70mm houses, and the film’s centerpiece became legend within weeks. A climactic three-car chase across California hill country, cameras surfing the road’s blind crests as pavement rises and drops like ocean swell, drew comparisons to the great pursuit sequences in film history, with many viewers declaring the comparison settled in this film’s favor. Jonny Greenwood’s needling, percussive score keeps even the quiet stretches at a simmer, and the film’s rhythm, sprint then breathe then sprint, makes 161 minutes move like far less.

The Length, the Politics, and the Tone Swings

Criticism clusters in three places. First, runtime. Even admirers concede the middle section, as Bob stumbles through a militarized suburb hunting for Willa, could shed minutes, and viewers less enchanted describe an episodic sag between the film’s two great engines, the opening raid era and the closing chase. Second, tone. Anderson swings between broad comedy, familial tenderness, and state violence within single sequences, and a minority found the whiplash glib, arguing the film giggles at things it also wants you to fear. The majority experienced that instability as the point, a country where absurdity and menace share every frame.

Third, and loudest in certain corners, politics. The film’s revolutionaries are treated with rueful affection, its immigration raids and detention machinery are shot as ambient American weather, and its villain is a fascist played for both laughs and horror. Viewers seeking neutrality found none on offer, and the film became a culture-war football in the way ambitious American movies about America tend to. Notably, even most hostile takes concede the filmmaking itself, which tells you where the argument actually lives.

A quieter note recurs among Anderson devotees. His trademark opacity is largely absent here, the film’s emotional beats land square and its themes speak plainly, and a sliver of his longtime audience misses the ambiguity. They are outnumbered by viewers grateful to be let in.

Anderson at Full Speed for Everyone

The story around this film matters as much as the film. For nearly thirty years Anderson made masterpieces that asked audiences to come to him. Here he spends blockbuster money and popular genre machinery, the chase film, the rescue plot, the buffoon hero rediscovering competence, without surrendering an inch of authorship, and the result proved that scale and singularity can still coexist in American movies. Bob’s arc, a man who mistook exhaustion for peace learning that fatherhood is just the revolution continued by other means, gives the spectacle a heart that plays to any audience. Viva la revolución, the film suggests, starts at home, preferably before the third rewatch of the passphrase you forgot.

Should You Watch One Battle After Another?

Watch it, in the largest format you can reach, whether or not Anderson’s earlier work ever clicked for you. This is his most welcoming film, and the chase alone belongs on every big-screen bucket list. It rewards a second viewing almost immediately.

Skip it only if open political fury in your entertainment is disqualifying, or if two hours and forty minutes exceeds your ceiling regardless of pace. Both objections are honest, and both mean missing the year’s defining film.

The Verdict on One Battle After Another

One Battle After Another is the rare event film that deserves its noise, a chase epic with a bathrobe-clad soul, a villain for the history books, and a hill-country pursuit that reset the standard for vehicular filmmaking. DiCaprio, Penn, del Toro, and the debuting Infiniti all operate at peak, and Anderson orchestrates the chaos with a showman’s glee he’d never fully unleashed before. It runs long, swings wild, and wears its politics like a flare gun, and those are the costs of a film this alive. American cinema spent years asking for originals at scale. This is what it looks like when one arrives.