One Battle After Another

by Chris Stewart 10.2025

Ever vital and surprising, Paul Thomas Anderson roars to the front of Awards-predictions with his blisteringly watchable One Battle After Another.  Built on, but crucially not actually about institutional distrust and fierce social outrage, Anderson's new film tracks the fallout of violent domestic revolutionaries after a crack-up. Burning-Man types, techy off-the-gridders, and a core of Black Power: the French 75 are a muddled bunch, but they get things done. At their center is the magnetic Perfidia (Teyana Taylor, delivering the goods and then some) the pseudo-figurehead (and problematic wild card) driving the whole operation. 

More than any given outcome, Perfidia wants to be wanted. To be liberated through sex, through anger, through visibility. Most of all: through control. She finds these in the French 75 and in doting, milder-minded Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio, winningly eager, sweetly washed-out) a hanger-on who knows explosives but, we suspect, might be lending his engineering skills to a knitting club if Perfidia happened to chair one of those, instead.

The French 75, as is the way of such things, eventually fall apart, both internally and via a vicous crackdown, and are scattered to the wind. Years later, Ghetto Pat is Bob Ferguson, father to a teenage daughter, a stoned middle-aged guy at a parent-teacher conference checking to make sure they're teaching the history of governmental oppression. Whither the righteous activism of Bob's younger years? But that's the thing of it. All of that energy has to go somewhere; the fire cannot be sustained. Rarely has disillusionment and the nervous waiting for the past's violent debts to come due been so funny.

Soon, Bob will find himself the target of the same militarized police force that broke up the gang back in the day, led by Colonel Lockjaw (a sinewy, spectacular Sean Penn). On the run to find his daughter Willa (wise, luminous newcomer Chase Infiniti), Bob will spend the film roving the streets, rooftops, and highways of a city on the verge of rioting. Anderson has a blast applying his sense of geography, scope, and motion to these. Our hero's journey will involve skateboarding teen gangs, secret sanctuaries, gun-wielding nuns, and the benevolence of the serene, beer-swilling Sensei (Benicio Del Toro, gorgeously zen).

In the nearly three-hour One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson's ideas, like his characters, almost never stop moving. When things slow down, it's for a reason. Whether the long, stately-framed passages introducing us to a (hilarious) secret society, or the lush, earthy interludes with Bob and Willa as he tries desperately to figure out how to be a single father to a teenage girl; the film locates real power as it balances tones, topics, and sometimes shocking behaviors with deft humor and pathos. And in the end, what Anderson wants to say, what's really been weighing on him, the why behind all of the bluster, kinky intrigue, and fireworks, is, sweetly, about love and the enormous, wonderful fear of how anyone can keep it safe in the crossfire.