{"id":443085,"date":"2025-09-22T10:43:15","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T10:43:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/443085\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T10:43:15","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T10:43:15","slug":"paul-thomas-andersons-explosive-galvanizing-epic-one-battle-after-another-is-the-best-film-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/443085\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s explosive, galvanizing epic One Battle After Another is the best film of the year"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Leonardo DiCaprio plays the oft-useless Pat\/Bob, a burnout in more ways than one.The Associated Press<\/p>\n

One Battle After Another<\/b><\/p>\n

Directed by<\/b> Paul Thomas Anderson<\/p>\n

Written by <\/b>Paul Thomas Anderson, loosely based on the novel Vineland by Thomas Pyncon <\/p>\n

Starring <\/b>Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor and Sean Penn<\/p>\n

Classification <\/b>14A; 162 minutes<\/p>\n

Opens in theatres<\/b> Sept. 26<\/p>\n

Critic\u2019s Pick <\/b><\/p>\n

Midway through One Battle After Another, director Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s exhilarating, hilarious and galvanizing new epic, a gone-to-pot revolutionary named Bob Ferguson (a.k.a. Ghetto Pat, a.k.a. the munitions expert of a once-feared militia called the French 75), places a desperate phone call to one of his old comrades, seeking a rendezvous point where he can reunite with his on-the-run daughter. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat time is it?\u201d asks the voice on the other end of the line, wary of giving out secret coordinates to the wrong or perhaps compromised individual. \u201cI don\u2019t remember that part! Let\u2019s not nitpick over the passwords,\u201d Bob replies, equal parts stoned and frantic. \u201cMaybe,\u201d the disembodied voice replies flatly, \u201cyou should have studied the rebellion text a little harder.\u201d <\/p>\n

The line, a riff about somehow playing by the rules of insurgency, is the perfect sour punchline to a series of juicy, grand jokes: gags about the persistence of paranoia, the sting of oppression, the pains of bureaucracy and the Sisyphean struggles of fighting the good fight, which Anderson laces throughout One Battle After Another, a magnificent achievement that is, without hyperbole, the finest film of the year. <\/p>\n

Thoughtful yet incendiary, romantic yet skeptical, patently absurd yet at the same time brandishing a mirror that so clearly and unforgivingly reflects our own cracked reality, Anderson\u2019s film arrives with the kind of casual, confident brilliance that feels deceptively effortless. <\/p>\n

The film\u2019s many thematic, narrative and visual gambits pay off so richly exactly because Anderson never tries to poke you in the ribs, to nudge your affections this way or that. P.T.A. \u2013 whose cinephile-circle initials have become as much a brand unto themselves as any other working filmmaker today \u2013 simply locks you in from the first minute. Before you\u2019ve had time to catch your breath and attempt to pull apart just how you quickly you were zipped along from points A to B, the ride is over and you\u2019re demanding another go-round. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

One Battle After Another marks the first time director Paul Thomas Anderson has told a contemporary story since 2002\u2019s Punch-Drunk Love.Warner Bros.<\/p>\n

While this marks the first time that the period-piece-loving Anderson has told a contemporary story since 2002\u2019s Punch-Drunk Love (itself a film that seemed to exist outside of concepts of time and space), One Battle After Another is also split into two halves and two generations. The first takes place 15 years before our current era, following the exploits of the California-based French 75 group as they free migrants from ICE-like detention facilities and rob banks to finance their revolutionary goals. <\/p>\n

The leader nominally appears to be Laredo (The Wire\u2019s Wood Harris), but Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) is the group\u2019s firecracker poster girl, a take-no-prisoners freedom fighter who captures the eyes and heart of Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio). Eventually, the pair settle down and have a daughter named Willa \u2013 the sight of Perfidia, firing off a machine gun whose butt rests atop her nine-months pregnant belly, is just one of several dozen instantly iconic one-perfect-shot compositions Anderson sears onto the screen \u2013 but soon the pressures of parenthood and the pull of her guerilla instincts push Perfidia back into a life of rebellion and risk. At the same time, Perfidia develops a backwards love-hate affair with the maniacal Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a proto-MAGA type who makes it his mission in life to hunt down the French 75. <\/p>\n

Flash-forward 15 years \u2013 all the aforementioned developments are laid out by Anderson in a relentlessly swift series of rat-a-tat-tat sequences that belie the film\u2019s super-sized run time \u2013 and Pat, or \u201cBob\u201d as he\u2019s now known, is living a quiet, booze- and weed-addled life in the fictional \u201csanctuary city\u201d of Baktan Cross alongside a teenage Willa (Chase Infiniti). While Perfidia remains in the wind, Lockjaw has finally picked up Bob and Willa\u2019s scent, and is now determined to crush the pair in order to secure standing in a secretive sect of white nationalists who essentially control the country from an underground lair. <\/p>\n

Very loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon\u2019s 1990 novel Vineland, which filtered ideas of lapsed rebellion and unchecked greed through the vortex of Ronald Reagan\u2019s America, Anderson\u2019s narrative is both his most twist-filled work (secret societies, secret passwords, secret parentage) and relatively straightforward. At its core, this is a film about a father separated from his daughter by a villain whose evil knows no bounds. And yet the way in which Anderson unfolds every chapter feels momentous, the story and style working in concert to create something deeply funny, tense, rollicking, unrelenting. This is powerful, powder-keg cinema that threatens to burn the screen down every few minutes. <\/p>\n

Everyone involved is doing their own part to keep the flames burning. DiCaprio is typically excellent as the oft-useless Pat\/Bob, a burnout in more ways than one whose well-intentioned befuddlement recalls Joaquin Phoenix\u2019s performance in Anderson\u2019s last great stoner comedy, Inherent Vice (another Pynchon adaptation). Infiniti, in her feature-film debut, is a remarkable bundle of determination and ferocity as Willa, especially when the character faces the past actions of her absent mother. And Benicio del Toro, popping up midway as a karate-trained confidant of Bob\u2019s who runs an underground railroad in Baktan Cross, is sublime in his restraint. His deadpan hero also might be the first character who could reasonably appear in films by both of cinema\u2019s reigning Andersons (that\u2019d be Wes and Paul Thomas).<\/p>\n

Yet it is Taylor and Penn who lord over everyone, the former offering a seismic preview of a career that is just beginning, the latter utilizing a career full worthy of sometimes hammy, sometimes affecting work to deliver a magnificently perverted creation. The few moments in which Taylor and Penn cross paths, sequences that play with notions of power and pleasure to such a bug-eyed degree that you can feel the entire energy of the audience shift and squirm, represent cinematic alchemy. <\/p>\n

Buoyed by a jittery, jangly score by Anderson\u2019s long-time collaborator Jonny Greenwood that is electric enough to power the grids of several municipalities, the film keeps on barreling down its road, right up until the final moment \u2013 a neo-Mexican standoff, constructed with the rigour and inventiveness that wonderfully blurs the line between Anderson and, say, James Cameron \u2013 everything explodes. <\/p>\n

By its end, One Battle After Another reveals itself as Hollywood\u2019s most contradictory creation in ages: a crowd-pleasing political manifesto, a riotous action-comedy of ideas, a movie constructed for the eye as much as the heart and mind. Now that\u2019s revolutionary. <\/p>\n

P.T.A. Films, Ranked <\/p>\n

10. Hard Eight (1996)<\/b><\/p>\n

The first bet is always the biggest, but the payday is there thanks to members of Anderson\u2019s soon-to-be repertory company of actors, including Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Philip Baker Hall and Melora Walters. <\/p>\n

9. Magnolia (1999)<\/b><\/p>\n

All for the sake of momentum, but what a ride. Including the frogs. <\/p>\n

8. Licorice Pizza (2021)<\/b><\/p>\n

True love blooms in the director\u2019s warmest, fuzziest offering. <\/p>\n

7. Inherent Vice (2014)<\/b><\/p>\n

A (slightly more) faithful dose of Pynchon, laced with enough Joaquin Phoenix laconism to get you high beyond supply. <\/p>\n

6. Punch-Drunk Love (2002)<\/b><\/p>\n

Anderson ruined pudding, but he saved Adam Sandler. <\/p>\n

5. Phantom Thread (2017)<\/b><\/p>\n

The perfectly toxic kiss, for those who love themselves sick the world over. <\/p>\n

4. Boogie Nights (1997)<\/b><\/p>\n

Anderson\u2019s bid to become a big, bright shining star (to borrow the words of Mark Wahlberg\u2019s Dirk Diggler) worked like gangbusters. And it still does today, with the director\u2019s sophomore effort easily his most rewatchable film. <\/p>\n

3. There Will Be Blood (2007)<\/b><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m finished!\u201d Daniel Day-Lewis bellows at the very end of this dirt-under-your-fingernails saga of struggle and sacrifice, a sentiment that Anderson fortunately resisted.<\/p>\n

2. One Battle After Another (2025)<\/b><\/p>\n

See above. <\/p>\n

1. The Master (2012)<\/b><\/p>\n

Anderson \u2013 and Phoenix, and Hoffman, and Amy Adams \u2013 at their very disciplined, stare-into-the-void peak. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Leonardo DiCaprio plays the oft-useless Pat\/Bob, a burnout in more ways than one.The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":443086,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,24789,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-443085","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-noastack","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115247540609611736","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/443086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}