One Battle After Another

Ready to join the Christmas Adventurers Club? Paul Thomas Anderson’s breathless satire is the best political action movie of the year, a defiantly anti-MAGA rallying cry featuring a six-pack of crackerjack performances. Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, the movie elides the decades to imagine 1970s-style revolutionaries taking on ICE in the early oughts, then smash-cuts to the Now, former radicals in retreat.

In his funniest turn since The Wolf of Wall Street, Leonardo DiCaprio is a permanently stoned and none too bright former militant forced out of hiding by Sean Penn’s pumped up military attack dog (Lockjaw). Newcomer Chase Infiniti is Willa, the young Black woman caught between them. The movie surges out of the gate, a wake up call for citizens numb or oblivious to the white supremacists’ death cult. In 50 years time, they’ll still be talking about this one.

One Battle After Another, as great an American movie as I’ve seen this year, doesn’t simply meet the moment; with extraordinary tenderness, fury, and imagination, it forges a moment all its own, and insists that better ones could still lie ahead.

Justin Chang, The New Yorker

An exciting, goofy and deadly serious big-screen no — a no to complacency, to oppression, to tyranny. It’s a carnivalesque epic about good and evil, violence and power, inalienable rights and the fight against injustice; it’s also a love story. The film speaks to the failures of the past and of the present but insists on the promise of the future. It’s brilliantly directed, but what makes it exhilarating is that it engages with its moment as few American fiction films do. It feels shockingly urgent. It’s also snort-out funny, even when its laughs tremble with rage.

Manohla Dargis, New York Times

One Battle After Another, a kinetic, fast-charging evisceration of present-day America is one of the more cogent political statements delivered by a major American filmmaker.

Robert Daniels