"One Battle After Another is top-tier Paul Thomas Anderson - not as good as There Will Be Blood or Phantom Thread but so much better than the average movie that it seems to belong in a different medium entirely. It sprawls across genres and tones and defiantly refuses to anchor itself to a single character. Leonardo DiCaprio is its biggest star,"
"One Battle After Another is Anderson's second riff on Thomas Pynchon, loosely inspired by his novel Vineland, but unlike the director's first, Inherent Vice, this new film isn't about the curdled aftermath of '60s idealism. He untethers the story from the Reagan era and drags it into the 21st century, where his characters free migrants from detention centers and plant bombs in the offices of anti-abortion congressmen. Rather than ruminating on innocence lost, it presents the ebbs and flows of activism as part of a larger pattern."
Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another delivers a sprawling, genre-blending narrative that resists anchoring to a single protagonist. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, a former radical and explosives expert who hides with his daughter and struggles with substance-fueled memory loss that prevents him from reconnecting to his old network. The film relocates activist drama to the 21st century, depicting characters who free migrants from detention and plant bombs in anti-abortion offices. Activism is shown as cyclical: participants wash out, sell out, or get arrested and are replaced by new recruits. The film balances measured optimism with a body count and features Sean Penn as an exaggerated military caricature.
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