One Battle After Another

One Battle After Another is a masterpiece: a crazy, spectacular, engaging, comic and moving film. Paul Thomas Anderson creates a spectacular action film that leaves you feeling and thinking. Since the plot moves at breakneck speed, the film's running time - 2 hours and 40 minutes, without end credits - is ok. This review is guaranteed to be spoiler-free.

Paul Thomas Anderson, known as PTA, is a talented director with a unique style, revealed by Boggie Nights, and consecrated by There Will Be Blood, then Phantom Thread, and Licorize Pizza. His name alone is enough to convince Hollywood stars. One Battle After Another is an action comedy, but also a political film about a fractured America. It questions the contested legacies of the radical struggles of the 60s and 70s, racism, immigration, the rise of conservatism, white supremacy. 

The film is loosely based on a book by Thomas Pynchon, Vineland. PTA had been wanting to adapt it for twenty years. By setting the story in our contemporary era, he frees himself from historical constraints. He achieves a fusion of genres: action, family drama, absurd comedy, political satire. While renewing himself for the main theme of the revolution (the group is also called French 75), PTA retains the themes that run through his films: family relationships, human flaws, memory, the weight of the past.

Thanks to its $140 million budget, the directing is great in the scenes of the attacks, the car chases, and the hunt for the revolutionaries. PTA's visual style is there with its sequence shots, this constantly moving camera. The editing is dynamic, creating a constant tension around the quest of Di Caprio's character. The film is to be seen on the big screen to benefit from these action scenes and those taking place in the desert. Michael Bauman, director of photography, filmed in VistaVision, to be able to project the film in Imax and 70mm. PTA chose to shoot in natural settings, in California, from Sacramento to Borrego Springs, then in El Paso, Texas. The music by Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) is particularly successful.

The film benefits from a talented cast. Leonardo DiCaprio, who dreamed of filming with PTA, is simply brilliant. He carries the film by playing a disillusioned revolutionary, inspired by The Big Lebowski. He is very funny but also moving in this role of father. The success of a movie often depends on that of the villain. Sean Penn, as the antagonist, plays a crazy, white supremacist colonel, who is particularly disturbing. Benicio Del Toro (Traffic, 21 Grams) plays the friend, a martial arts teacher with an impassive composure, nicknamed Sensei. The script gives pride of place to a trio of formidable actresses. Teyana Taylor brings all her energy to the role of a revolutionary, feminist, fast-paced mother. Regina Hall plays the role of a friend who looks out for others, both strong and gentle. Finally, Chase Infinity, as the young Willa, is the film's revelation. These performers have all trained to be able to perform their stunts. One Battle at a Time is the film of this Autumn, a cinematic bombshell in both form and content. No wonder Steven Spielberg found it "incredible."

One Battle After Another
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Produced by Paul Thomas Anderson, Sara Murphy and Adam Sommer 
Starring Leonardo Di Caprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infinity
Cinematography : Paul Thomas Anderson and Michael Bauman
Edited by Andy Jurgensen
Music by Jonny Greenwood
Production company : Ghoulardi Film company with WB Pictures 
Distributed by Warner Bros Pictures
Release dates : Septembre 24, 2025 (France), September 26, 2025 (United States),
Running time :  161 minutes

Seen September 19, 2025 at Pathé Baugrenelle (Paris)

Sabine's Mark:

There are films that come along with the air of inevitability, works that feel less like premieres than like events that have always been waiting to happen. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is one of those rare cases, an audacious, sprawling, politically loaded epic that marries his restless artistry with the radical chaos of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. The result is a movie that feels both furious and hilarious, both deeply rooted in today’s fractured America and strangely nostalgic for an era when underground resistance movements still believed they could bend history. That tension — between cynicism and hope, exhaustion and urgency — is what makes the film not just a dazzling piece of cinema, but a conversation with the times we’re living through.

The story begins in explosive fashion with the French 75, a ragtag militant group whose opening mission involves storming an immigrant detention center on the U.S.-Mexico border. Front and center is Teyana Taylor as Perfidia Beverly Hills, a performance so ferocious and charismatic that it threatens to swallow the film whole. She moves with the swagger of someone born into revolution, her machine gun cradled against her pregnant belly as though rebellion itself were hereditary. It’s no surprise that both Leonardo DiCaprio’s explosives expert “Pat” and Sean Penn’s leering Col. Steven J. Lockjaw are instantly consumed by her. One falls in love, the other in lust, and their rival obsessions ignite the narrative. The triangle is messy, sexual, political, and painfully human — and from it emerges a child, Willa, whose future will define the second half of the film.

Sixteen years later, the story shifts. Pat has shed his revolutionary alias for the weary shell of Bob Ferguson, a pot-soaked recluse raising teenage Willa in the shadows. Chase Infiniti, in her extraordinary debut, gives Willa the emotional center of the movie: she is not a damsel but a daughter born into chaos, forced to reckon with the ideals and failures of her parents’ generation. There is a remarkable tenderness in the way she challenges Bob’s paranoia and his refusal to move with the times — her eye-rolling over outdated tech or her father’s fumbling with pronouns feels drawn from real generational tension. And yet, as Paul Thomas Anderson makes clear, Willa is more than a symbol of youth correcting age. She is the inheritor of a fight that was never finished, the embodiment of a revolution deferred.

What follows is a film that could have been a chase thriller and is instead something far stranger, a tapestry woven from jet-black comedy, bruising action, and political satire. There are sequences that rival the best action cinema of the last decade: a car chase down rolling desert highways shot with a languid patience that makes every dip in the road feel like a plunge into the unknown; street riots where the chaos of protest and police repression collapse into pure cinematic rhythm; and a rooftop escape where Bob, stoned and overweight, stumbles like a vaudeville fool, unable to recall his old revolutionary passwords while drones circle above. Paul Thomas Anderson wrings equal parts dread and comedy from Bob’s bumbling — Leonardo DiCaprio leans into physical humor reminiscent of his infamous quaaludes crawl in The Wolf of Wall Street — but beneath the laughs is something poignant: a father desperately out of his depth, driven only by the need to save his child.

The villains of this tale, however, are not so funny. Sean Penn’s Col. Lockjaw is a grotesque yet chilling creation, a man whose white-supremacist ideology festers beneath his fetish for domination. His attempt to join the secret society known as the Christmas Adventurers’ Club — a cabal of elites who toast “Hail, St. Nick!” with a straight face — plays as absurdist satire until you remember how openly such ideas now circulate in our political life. Sean Penn’s twitchy, repressed physicality makes Lockjaw both laughable and terrifying, a caricature of authoritarian masculinity whose menace feels uncomfortably familiar. His obsession with Willa is as personal as it is ideological, turning the chase into a parable of America’s ugliest truths: racism, patriarchy, and the endless recycling of violence.

But One Battle After Another is not simply a duel between revolutionary purity and fascist rot. Paul Thomas Anderson, as always, complicates. The French 75 are no saints. Their zeal is magnetic but exhausting, their codes and slogans both inspiring and ridiculous. Regina Hall’s Deandra and Alana Haim’s Mae West embody the contradictions of revolutionaries who believe so fervently that their humanity sometimes gets lost in the cause. And then there’s Benicio del Toro as Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, a martial arts instructor whose dry stoicism masks a role in the underground railroad for immigrants. He is both comic foil and moral anchor, reminding us that resistance is not just about grand gestures but about the quiet work of keeping people alive.

What’s extraordinary is how seamlessly Paul Thomas Anderson moves between tones. One minute we’re watching Bob threaten to shove dynamite somewhere anatomically impossible, the next we’re plunged into the heartbreak of Willa learning the half-truths of her mother’s disappearance. Jonny Greenwood’s score, alternately thrumming and tender, bridges these shifts, while Michael Bauman’s cinematography frames America as a landscape both mythic and rotten, wide highways cutting through communities under siege. The whole enterprise feels at once epic and intimate, like a fever dream projected in VistaVision.

It’s tempting to call One Battle After Another Paul Thomas Anderson’s most political film, but that undersells what he achieves. Yes, it skewers white nationalism, the failures of liberalism, and the absurdities of generational culture wars. But at its core, the film is about family — about the ways children inherit not just our genetics but our battles, our compromises, our unfinished revolutions. In Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob, we see the burnout of a man who once believed he could change the world and now struggles just to keep his daughter safe. In Chase Infiniti’s Willa, we see the resilience and clarity of youth who must decide whether to carry forward the fight or forge something new.

The final scenes, without spoiling specifics, offer a kind of lullaby, a moment of peace that feels both false and necessary. Paul Thomas Anderson knows that revolutions rarely end in comfort, but he also knows that audiences — and perhaps children — need stories that let them sleep at night. It’s a delicate balance between despair and solace, and One Battle After Another walks that line with bruised grace.

Paul Thomas Anderson has always been a filmmaker of contradictions: maximalist yet intimate, cynical yet romantic, precise yet chaotic. With One Battle After Another, he delivers his wildest, most urgent contradiction yet — a studio-funded, $175 million anti-establishment action comedy that feels dangerous to the touch. It is a film of our time, but also of all times, because the battles it depicts are never really over. They are inherited, reshaped, and fought again. One battle after another.

One Battle After Another
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Produced by Paul Thomas Anderson, Sara Murphy and Adam Sommer 
Starring Leonardo Di Caprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infinity
Cinematography : Paul Thomas Anderson and Michael Bauman
Edited by Andy Jurgensen
Music by Jonny Greenwood
Production company : Ghoulardi Film company with WB Pictures 
Distributed by Warner Bros Pictures
Release dates : Septembre 24, 2025 (France), September 26, 2025 (United States),
Running time :  161 minutes

Seen on September 24, 2025, at Gaumont Disney Village, Theater 8, Seat A19

Mulder's Mark: