Paul Thomas Anderson has spent the better part of three decades burrowing into the American soul—charting its boom-and-bust appetites, its bruised dreams, its restless need to reinvent itself. From the oil-soaked ambition of There Will Be Blood to the Altman-esque sprawl of Boogie Nights and the bittersweet nostalgia of Licorice Pizza, his films have often looked backward, excavating the myths of earlier eras to see how they shaped the present. For more than twenty years he seemed content to haunt the past, teasing out the echoes of the twentieth century with the patience of an archaeologist.
With One Battle After Another, he doesn’t just glance toward the present—he charges into it, headlong and unapologetic. The jolt is exhilarating. Here is Anderson swapping the gauzy comfort of period detail for the raw immediacy of a contemporary America riven by fear, racism, and a new strain of authoritarian bravado. Yet he carries over all the craft and sly humanism that have always marked his work: the restless camera that feels as alive as the characters it follows, the ability to find moments of bruised intimacy amid spectacle, and the sly humor that undercuts even the darkest turns. It’s the leap of a filmmaker who knows exactly where he’s been and—just as thrillingly—has decided it’s time to meet the country where it lives now.
This is America
One Battle After Another begins in chaos: the French 75, a ragged crew of revolutionaries, storming an immigrant detention center in the California desert. Jonny Greenwood’s score—by turns percussive and almost mischievously melodic—doesn’t just underline the action; it pushes you into it. The camera lurches and glides in old-school Vistavision, a format that turns every speck of dust and every bead of sweat into something tactile. You can practically feel the grit on your cheeks as the escape vehicles skid across the desert.
This is Anderson playing with pulp energy, but he’s after something bigger than genre fireworks. His villains are no cartoon: Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven Lockjaw, running the detention center with icy precision, is the embodiment of a distinctly American cruelty, part bureaucrat, part demagogue. When he murmurs to Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills—while she’s subduing him—“I’ll be seeing you soon,” it isn’t just a threat. It’s the promise of a long national nightmare.
Anderson doesn’t pin these horrors to a single year or administration. He draws from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, a novel born of the Reagan era, but he keeps dates deliberately fuzzy. That choice makes the film feel both of this moment and slightly out of time—today’s anxieties in a frame that could be yesterday’s or tomorrow’s. Immigration, white-nationalist rot, the lure of authoritarian “clubs” that smell like country clubs until you catch the whiff of fascism—these things, Anderson suggests, are never strictly historical.
Of Exceptional Performances and Technical Mastery
The cast is an embarrassment of riches and somehow no one coasts. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson is a revelation of sly comic timing—less frantic than his Don’t Look Up turn, more morally rumpled than his Wolf of Wall Street scoundrel. He’s the man who once believed in grand gestures of revolution and now hides in a haze of drugs and guilt, trying to raise a daughter who’s tired of raising him. Chase Infiniti, in her film debut, meets him beat for beat. She has the poise of someone twice her age and the quiet fire of a Taylor Russell and the inner rage of an Alicia Vikander. You can sense a career beginning in real time.
Penn, meanwhile, goes for broke. His Lockjaw is terrifying not because he rants, but because he hardly raises his voice. When he sets his sights on Bob’s daughter Willa, convinced—wrongly or not—that she’s his own child, the film sharpens into a parable of patriarchal obsession. Taylor, electric as Perfidia, gives the first act its spark and unpredictability; her disappearance from the narrative is almost a loss you feel physically. If there’s a genuine complaint to lodge, it’s that the film never quite recaptures the jolt of her presence once she’s gone.
Technically, One Battle After Another is a feast. Michael Bauman’s cinematography drinks in the California hills, the monastery that smells faintly of weed, the dust-blown highways where a third-act car chase barrels forward as if the camera were bolted to a bumper. Anderson’s decision to shoot in Vistavision—an old Hollywood wide-gauge format—gives everything a textural richness that digital work rarely captures. Greenwood’s score, full of off-kilter percussion and sudden swells of melody, finds the uneasy sweet spot between satire and dread.
Trading Pynchon’s Denseness to Achieve Something Resonant
But the movie’s slyest trick is emotional. Anderson pares Pynchon’s notorious sprawl down to a beating heart: the bruised, funny, complicated love between a father and daughter. Bob might look like a washout—stoned, paranoid, clinging to a half-forgotten cause—but every shambolic action is threaded with a desperate, almost tender desire to protect Willa. Their relationship keeps the film from floating away in its own madcap conspiracy.
This is where Anderson’s kinship with Pynchon feels deepest. Twice now he’s gone where few filmmakers dare, adapting a writer whose novels are famously unfilmable. He seems drawn not to the encyclopedic plotting but to the lonely eccentrics at their core: losers, drifters, people history has left behind. Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice had that shaggy charm; Bob Ferguson has it too, only wearier and more haunted. Anderson understands that Pynchon’s so-called “losers” carry a strange, stubborn dignity—and he honors that by letting Bob’s halting attempts at fatherhood be the story’s real revolution.
Not that Anderson has gone soft. One Battle After Another is easily his most overtly political film. The shadowy Christmas Adventures Club—a cabal of white-supremacist elites in Santa Claus drag—could be read as grotesque fantasy, but the satire cuts close enough to sting. He’s poking at the same American sickness that Pynchon once skewered, yet the result never feels like a lecture. He wants you to laugh, then flinch, then laugh again, because that uneasy oscillation is the point.
Getting Personal with a Particular Needle Drop
About halfway through One Battle After Another, Anderson does something sly and oddly moving: he lets Steely Dan have the floor. “Dirty Work,” that deceptively smooth early-’70s groove, slips in over a montage of Bob Ferguson staggering through his drug-hazed morning, barely managing the most basic rituals of parenting. It’s not just a canny needle drop; Bob actually name-checks the band a few scenes later, as if Anderson wants to make sure we catch the resonance.
Steely Dan have always been masters of the sardonic confession—those immaculate, jazzy arrangements masking lyrics about misfits, moral drift, and people who can’t quite get it together. In other words, the spiritual cousins of Pynchon’s wanderers. And as a fan of the band, I find this Easter egg very exciting.
Anderson’s affection for Pynchon has always been about more than the tangled plots. What draws him are the characters who stumble through history’s margins: people branded as losers, yet stubbornly human in their confusion. By dropping “Dirty Work” into Bob’s lowest point, Anderson weds that Pynchonian streak of amused fatalism to a pop song that’s been carrying the same wounded wit. The track’s breezy saxophone and wry refrain—I’m a fool to do your dirty work, oh yeah—isn’t just a soundtrack to Bob’s collapse; it’s an anthem for every Pynchon hero who keeps getting pulled into schemes and revolutions he only half understands.
It’s also classic Anderson. For all his bravura camerawork and operatic set pieces, he’s never been shy about letting a well-chosen song speak for him. “Dirty Work” feels like both a wink and a quiet thesis: beneath the chaos, the car chases, and the big political machinery, this is still the story of a man who sees his own shortcomings with painful clarity…and keeps lurching forward anyway.
On Some Minor Quibbles (Tonal Shifts, Character Arcs)
Some viewers may have complaints about tonal whiplash—the way a nervy joke can lead to a sudden gunshot, or how a tender father-daughter moment can bump against a sequence of bureaucratic horror. But that instability is precisely the flavor of Pynchon’s universe and, I’d argue, of our own. Anderson invites us to laugh at the stupidity of it all right before reminding us how quickly the stupid can turn lethal.
At two hours and forty-three minutes, One Battle After Another moves with the velocity of something half its length. Anderson sustains a high-wire energy in a run-all-night sequence across Los Angeles that rivals anything in his career. The aerial shots over the desert, the bumper-level chase photography—he makes it look effortless. After decades of staging period pieces, he’s finally grappling with the now, and it’s invigorating to see him stretch into the present tense without losing his old-school craft.
There’s also the unmistakable sense of a filmmaker in conversation with his own life. Bob is an aging radical and a fumbling father to a mixed-race child; Anderson himself has spoken about watching his children grow up in a fractured America. The film carries a quiet faith that the next generation can push back against the ugliness that ours has either tolerated or helped create. Maybe that faith is naïve. Anderson seems to say: so what? Belief in tomorrow matters because it refuses to die.
If I have quibbles, they’re small: I missed Perfidia’s dangerous spark once she exited, and a couple of mid-film subplots could have been tightened without dulling the impact. But these are the sorts of imperfections that come with audacity. The movie is big, unruly, alive.
‘One Battle After Another’: On Being the Best Film of the Year
I walked out exhilarated, shaken, and oddly hopeful. Anderson hasn’t made his most perfectly crafted picture—that still might be There Will Be Blood—or his most tender (Punch-Drunk Love) or his funniest (Boogie Nights). But One Battle After Another feels, to me, like his most urgent and politically charged work, a howl against cruelty and a quiet hymn to the stubbornness of love. In a year already crowded with strong cinema, it stands alone as the movie I can’t stop thinking about—the one that convinces me, against my own cynicism, that tomorrow might still be worth fighting for.
And if that’s not the makings of the year’s best film, then I don’t know what is.
A self-described cinephile who can’t stop talking—and writing—about films. Paul also moonlights as ghostwriter and editor for a few memoirs. He currently resides in the Philippines.
