One Battle After Another
First screened and reviewed in October 2025
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson. Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall, Shayna McHayle, James Raterman, Eric Schweig, Tony Goldwyn, Wood Harris, Paul Grimstad, Alana Haim, Dijon Duenas, Starletta DuPois, John Hoogenakker, Carlos McFarland, Colton Gantt, Elisabeth Pease, Autumn Crosswhite, Tisha Sloan, D.W. Moffett, Kevin Tighe, James Downey, Bryan Pickens, Dan Chariton, Marisela Borjas Ramirez, April Grace, Sherron Gassoway. Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson (inspired by the novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon). In Brief:
Gratifies all our parched fantasies of consummate technique, entertainment, and engagement with the world.
VOR:⑤
Took one day of commercial release for this to join a pop-cultural and pop-political pantheon. Everyone gambled, surpassed themselves, and won.
1. A movie whose first act outdoes even the amazing first acts of other PTA movies, and is maybe the most stunning first act of a commercial U.S. movie since Saving Private Ryan
2. A movie where PTA comes the closest he's ever come to a last act on par with his first
3. The closest Hollywood has come in recent or even semi-recent memory to making a genuinely brave, genuinely provocative movie about now, and the run-up(s) to now, and the all-too-plausible sequel(s) to now
4. A movie that could be studied forever as an exercise in sustaining pace, which does not mean it sustains the same pace, but even with its symphonic oscillations between acceleration and slowdown, concentration and expansion, One Battle is always carefully judged and always moving (except when white mega-wealthy men are sitting at a table, and the vandalizing of pace is part of the point)
5. A movie with a shape-shifting score, sometimes unrecognizable from one movement to the next, rolling out through a huge percentage of the movie without ever (unlike other great PTA scores) upstaging the rest of the film. Greenwood's music augments and often complicates action instead of just hitting nails bluntly on the head, as the song cues arguably do.
6. A movie with my favorite DiCaprio performance since The Departed (only Don't Look Up comes close), and my favorite DiCaprio hair, which isn't even supposed to look good!
7. A movie that oughta have Those Who Don't Know googling the hell out of Teyana Taylor. I hope and assume A Thousand and One is getting a lot of streams right now, and bless that. She's extraordinary in this, as are our old friends Benicio and Regina.
8. Welcome back, Sean!
9. A rare American movie that actually seems to have made contact with an expansive range of the Americas inside America.
10. A PTA movie with excellent, story-specific cinematography, without (as with the score) asking us to worship it.
11. Not just "inspired by" Thomas Pynchon's Vineland but an inspired and inspiring reconstitution of major elements of Vineland's plot and characters. One Battle is attuned to a different era but informed by overlapping histories, and it honors Pynchon's themes and structure while absolutely standing as its own, quite different thing. Battle > Inherent Vice by a bunch of long, dangerous, rising and falling highway miles.
12. A strong retroactive suggestion that the starkly different Licorice Pizza, which I liked quite a lot, was the labor of slightly self-indulgent love we knew it to be but also a chance to make something with a bunch of new-ish collaborators and to settle back into a mode of multi-threaded storytelling after quite a few star vehicles and chamber pieces, however epically sized, in the preceding 20+ years, so that all the creative engineering and the necessary, collaborative affinities were humming by the time Anderson tackled this.
13. A movie where I would not have minded a couple characters getting more of a role in how the last hour unfolds, and where I'm wrestling with a few rhetorical choices early and late, and where the highly personal and very engaging telescoping around a father and a daughter simultaneously comes at the expense of other figures and pointedly reflects which people often drop out of official histories and folk narratives in which they were the motivating, highly-skilled protagonists and the life-saving intercessors. We can sit with all that and more. But a movie that leaves you sitting with something—sitting, in fact, with QUITE A FRIGGING LOT!—is my kind of movie. Grade:A
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
