Best films of 2025 in the UK: No 1 One Battle After Another

"Film-making at level A+, but try as I might I couldn't muster up an ounce of empathy for Leo DiCaprio or Sean Penn. I kept waiting for them to die. But that's why the film is gripping: there is indeed no empathy for its two unlovely leading males, and their mortality and vulnerability has a kind of unwinding, entropic energy."

"It is moviemaking with a late-Kubrick elegance and a knowing theatricality, culminating in an exhilarating but also eerily strange car chase on an undulating freeway. This isn't the same as style without substance, but it's certainly a movie that can't help put promote its self-aware style to equal status with its subject matter: a petty-tyrannical America of the present and future, and those who will grow old in resisting it from within."

"The question that can't quite be answered is of when and where it is supposed to be set. The US of 10 or 20 years ago? Or an alt-reality imagined version of America in the present; a bizarro-world America? This knight's-move it takes away from a recognisable contemporary world is partly a function of adapting Pynchon, with his playfully cartoonish imagination, and moreover updating his novel, whose present-day action was supposed to be taking place in the Reaganite 80s, with flashbacks to the freaky 60s."

One Battle After Another is a countercultural drama-thriller that operates as a formal enigma, provoking varied responses while resisting a single definitive meaning. The filmmaking is technically daring and supercharged with audacity, exhibiting late-Kubrick elegance, theatrical knowingness and spectacular set-pieces such as an exhilarating yet eerie car chase on an undulating freeway. The two central male characters remain unlovable and elicit little empathy; their mortality and vulnerability create an entropic energy that propels them toward disaster. The film deliberately obscures its temporal location, shifting an earlier Reagan-era frame toward a near-past or alternative present and envisioning perpetual cultural crisis.

Read at www.theguardian.com