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
Paul Thomas Anderson
Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Chase Infiniti, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor
USA
2025
English
Indigenous & Community Access
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Credits
Screenwriter
Paul Thomas Anderson
Cinematography
Michael Bauman
Editor
Andy Jurgensen
Original Music
Jonny Greenwood
Production Design
Florencia Martin
Also in This Series
Catch some of the best films of 2025, back on the big screen.
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Having run afoul of an influential bureaucrat in Brazil’s military dictatorship circa 1977, Marcelo decamps to Recife to live under an assumed name — but he’ll soon come to understand precisely how rampant the country’s corruption has become.
Sinners
This year's unexpected box office sleeper is that rare beast, a genre movie full of bold invention and surprise. We are in Mississippi in the early 1930s, and the opening of a new blues joint on the edge of town is the signal for all hell to break out.
Nouvelle Vague
Linklater's love letter to Paris, 1959, and the difficult birth of Jean-Luc Godard's first feature, Breathless, channels the auteur's blithe self confidence and an era of all-encompassing cinephilia. It's the next best thing to being there.
One Battle After Another
PT 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. They'll still be talking about this one 50 years from now.
There's Still Tomorrow
A critical and box office sensation in Italy, Paola Cortellesi's triumphant directorial debut is the tale of a Roman housewife in 1946, who stands up against the routine sexist abuse she suffers. Funny, heartbreaking and inspiring.
Sentimental Value
A once-revered director crashes back into his family’s lives, eager to recruit his daughter for a film role. When she declines, he finds a new muse in an eager but unpolished Hollywood star, sending his botched reconciliation spiraling into chaos.