The critical Establishment is all in on Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie, One Battle After Another. A loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, the movie is being praised for accurately capturing the terrible, sinking feeling of being alive in 2025. The film has been a looming curiosity — it had a reported budget of $175 million, expensive given that no previous Anderson film has made over $100 million. Plus, there’s the mystery of why an Oscars-bound movie would entirely skirt the fall-festival circuit, bypassing premieres at Venice, TIFF, or Telluride to just open wide on September 26. What even is this movie? Well, it’s the most critically lauded film of the year.
In One Battle After Another, DiCaprio’s ex-revolutionary named Bob Ferguson faces off against his old enemy, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn. Their work is being praised as the best work they’ve given “in years.” Meanwhile, performances from newcomer Chase Infiniti as Bob’s daughter Willa, Teyana Taylor as Willa’s mother Perfidia, and Regina Hall and Benicio del Toro as the couple’s former co-conspirators are all lauded for their magnetism and tenderness. Still, it’s Anderson’s work capturing the contemporary mood that’s the most exciting for critics, with Vulture’s Alison Willmore saying he “untethers the story from the Reagan era and drags it into the 21st century.” Below, find the winning One Battle After Another reviews.
“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.” — Alison Willmore, Vulture
“Vaguely abstracted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1984-set Vineland but eager to reflect a variety of post-Reaganite advancements in ethno-fascism (the action starts in a recognizable today before jumping 16 years forward into a pointedly unchanged tomorrow), this propulsive, hilarious, and overwhelmingly tender paranoid comedy-thriller car chase blockbuster whatever doesn’t just stare a broken country in the face with its already prescient tale of immigrant detention centers, white nationalist caricatures, and bullshit pretenses for deploying the military into sanctuary cities. It’s also the first movie of its size to accurately crystallize how fucking anxious it feels to be alive right now — to capture the IMAX cartoonishness of our reality and provide a convincing roadmap as to how we might survive it.” — David Ehrlich, IndieWire
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“Aren’t you tired of fighting? Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another comes along at a time in world history in which conflict seems to be the daily duty, turning Thomas Pynchon’s ’80s-set Vineland into a deeply humanist story of rebellion that will be read as 2020s political commentary despite never using terms like MAGA or Antifa. Anderson’s phenomenal screenplay is a timeless story of resistance, one that playfully weaves together influences as broad-reaching as the true story of Weather Underground and cinematic depictions of rebellion, but it’s also a remarkably propulsive, fun, and eventually moving piece of work about the human beings caught up in the chaotic machine. It’s a live wire that drops in the first scene, setting off sparks for the next 162 minutes.” — Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com
“These are curious and perilous times we live in, the kind that call for courage and perseverance on all fronts. It can be exhausting, even if you’re not trying to take down the establishment or have long since given up the righteous fight. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a lot of things: a parable about fathers and daughters, a conspiracy thriller for the ICE age, an ensemble comedy that encourages all-stars to get their best eccentricity on, the single greatest film of 2025, a movie that’s less a VistaVision adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland than a passing nod to the author on the way to its own profound insights.” — David Fear, Rolling Stone
“Both One Battle After Another and Vineland concern the ebb and flow of radicalism in America, bursts of activity followed by years of dangerous and disillusioning fallout. Anderson has contemporized the timeline, situating us in our dismayingly recognizable era of fascist creep and following a sadly less recognizable underground effort to stop it. It is a frightening and galvanizing vision, Anderson putting away his complicated nostalgia for old (and more easily understood) days to confront, with disarmingly noble purpose, the here and now.” — Richard Lawson, The Hollywood Reporter
