At present, the mantelpiece of Paul Thomas Anderson remains strikingly light on major trophies. Despite being responsible for some of the films widely acknowledged to be the best of the century so far, including There Will Be Blood, The Master and Magnolia, the writer-director is yet to win an Oscar, Golden Globe or more than one Bafta (original screenplay for 2021's Licorice Pizza).
They tried to warn us PTA doesn't miss. One Battle After Anotherearned the National Board of Review's top honor this year, adding a third Best Film award to the shelf (next to all the karate trophies). In addition to Best Director for Paul Thomas Anderson, Leonardo DiCaprio won Best Actor, Chase Infiniti won Breakthrough Performance, and Benicio Del Toro won Best Supporting Actor, again, after earning it from the New York Film Critics Circle.
"This is a great time to be a parent. Actually, please allow me to clarify that: This is a profoundly godawful fucking time to be a parent on almost every conceivable level (which might explain why fewer Americans than ever are choosing to have children), but - if you put aside the looming danger of authoritarianism, the prohibitive cost of childcare, the rising tides of ecological catastrophe, the brain-wormed fight to deprive people of miraculous vaccines, the national indifference towards mass shootings, the fact that our hyper-stratified economy is only being held together by sticky tack, and the imminent threat that " Wicked: For Good" poses to us all - it's a great time to be a parent who watches a lot of new movies, if only because it suddenly feels like most of the really good ones are about us."
We're barely into October, so any talk of Oscar front-runners should be taken with a blimp-size grain of salt. That caveat aside, One Battle After Another has indeed established itself as an early 2025-2026 Oscar front-runner, thanks to rave reviews and a few unbeatable narratives (including my favorite: This is the movie we need during these uncertain times.) The other major angle pushing One Battle's Oscar hopes along is that, well, it may just be Paul Thomas Anderson's time.
One Battle After Another is already available to preorder on 4K Blu-ray at Walmart ahead of its worldwide theatrical premiere this Friday. Walmart was briefly taking preorders on a Limited Edition Steelbook, but it's either sold out or Walmart decided to turn off the ability to preorder since the movie technically probably wasn't supposed to be available to order until tomorrow.
We have a lot of ways to describe the sense that human events occur in recurring patterns, and that the struggles between things like freedom and slavery or tolerance and hatred will endure even longer than the contest between good and evil that Robert Mitchum taught us about in Night of the Hunter. It can be easy to let this cyclical perspective slide into a cynical one, and on one level, including its title, Paul Thomas Anderson's new film One Battle After Another fits that bill.
Until his monumental new film, Paul Thomas Anderson had only made a single narrative feature set in the 21st century, and that movie - a love story about a plunger salesman who hoards pudding cups, gets extorted by the owner of a phone sex line, and shares an iconic kiss to the sound of a Shelley Duvall song from 1980 - was less of its time than out of it.
