Despite the near-unanimous praise, Paul Thomas Anderson’s reach once again exceeds his grasp.
In one brief moment in One Battle After Another, Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) is seen settling down with a joint and watching Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 docudrama The Battle of Algiers on television. The moment carries a bittersweet poignancy in context, with Ferguson — the revolutionary previously known as “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun — reduced to getting his radical kicks on a screen at home. But it’s also a bold move to invoke a cinematic classic so offhandedly, thereby inviting viewers to make comparisons to the present film. And Paul Thomas Anderson’s flick comes nowhere close to measuring up to Pontecorvo’s still-shining example of genuinely intelligent radical cinema.
That, of course, flies in the face of the near-unanimous hosannahs that have greeted the film ever since its release in late September, recently placing high on many best-of-2025 lists and earning eight Golden Globe nominations. Usually with such mismatches of personal taste and consensus, I’m content to let them pass by without public comment. But when some of those voices are going so far as to call Anderson’s film the best of the 21st century to date, then I think a bit of cold water ought to be thrown.
But then, I feel that often about Anderson’s films. Maybe it’s telling that, for me, his best works are generally his most small-scale, like the charmingly eccentric romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love; and Phantom Thread, a dark romance that could also be seen as a deadpan comedy of remarriage. When he aims higher, though, his reach usually exceeds his grasp. His early epics Boogie Nights and Magnolia nearly drowned in their flashy cinematic influences. And though he calmed down considerably by the time he made There Will Be Blood, that film’s stark aesthetic qualities weren’t enough to cover for skin-deep characterizations that thinned out its attempted foundation-of-America myth-making.
Such superficiality also plagues One Battle After Another. Anderson evokes many timely hot-button issues in his screenplay (inspired loosely by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland). Its opening action sequence touches on anxieties about the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, since it’s set in a detention center along the U.S.-Mexico border that Pat, his partner Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), and the rest of the French 75 revolutionary group infiltrate. Later, Bob’s fumbling attempts to evade the clutches of Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) take place in a sanctuary city, Baktan Cross, where war has broken out between its residents and the military. And then there’s the Christmas Adventurers Club, an underground group of wealthy white supremacists which Lockjaw wants to join.
Illegal immigration, police violence, racism: all prominent issues in our current sociopolitical moment. But Anderson is content to simply toss out signifiers instead of actually exploring the reasons for our cultural unrest. Compare that to the nuanced political engagement of the aforementioned Battle of Algiers, where Pontecorvo’s sympathies for the rebels in the French-Algerian War didn’t preclude viewing the French from a fair-minded perspective. By contrast, Anderson is merely preaching to the left-leaning choir.
One could argue that Anderson’s interest lies less in political sloganeering than in character study. But the characters in One Battle After Another are as shallow as its politics. This is especially the case for Perfidia Beverly Hills, the character given the shortest shrift in Anderson’s screenplay. Sex is as much of a driving force for her as revolutionary fervor: She’s visibly turned on not only by Pat’s explosives knowledge, but by humiliating Lockjaw, forcing him at gunpoint to achieve an erection and walk outside with it at the immigrant detention center. That act of emasculation comes back to bite her, as he, turned on by dominant Black women generally, later threatens her into a sexual relationship with him. When Perfidia gets caught in a bank robbery gone wrong, Lockjaw uses their secret sexual rendezvous to get her to turn on her French 75 brethren, thereby forcing her to leave both Pat and their daughter Charlene (Chase Infiniti) as she goes into witness protection.
Perfidia’s arc might have been more gut-wrenching had Anderson evinced an interest in examining the character’s inner complications: the ambivalence she feels about motherhood, the question of whether she’s also turned on by Lockjaw. Instead, she comes off as merely an oversexed Black woman who gets into trouble for her attraction to powerful White men.
There’s a lesser but also disturbing instance of the unpleasant tokenism that comes from this type of superficially drawn character. After French 75 member Deandra (Regina Hall) pulls Charlene, now Willa Ferguson, from a high-school dance to evade capture from Lockjaw, it is glaring that the one non-binary member of Willa’s friend group is the one who sells her out. The optics can’t help but unsettle, especially since Bob’s pot-addled heroism and Lockjaw’s cartoonish villainy get way more of the film’s attention. It’s not that Anderson is a racist — he’s married to a Black Jewish woman, Maya Rudolph, with whom he happily has four kids — it’s just that if your actors are inhabiting such thinly-drawn pigeonholes, a couple of vulnerable minority characters being visibly weak or evil can be quite damning.
One Battle After Another is by no means bad. Anderson, always a generous director of actors, gets committed performances from his stacked ensemble. A climactic three-way car chase in which steep California hills play a crucial role is one of the most visually and narratively inventive of its type. And Jonny Greenwood has come up with yet another brilliant score, an oft-dissonant motor propelling the action forward. The juxtaposition of Bob’s antics and Greenwood’s serious music is the most distinctly Andersonian touch, a reminder of the inner prankster that birthed such memorably bizarre moments as the black-comic ending of There Will Be Blood.
One previous Anderson title I didn’t mention is The Master. That’s the one film in which he most successfully combines his ambitious and humanistic sides. Its fictionalized depiction of the creation of Scientology is a mere backdrop for the surrogate father-and-son relationship at its heart between rootless World War II veteran Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). There’s a genuine empathy at the heart of The Master that makes its oddest touch — Dodd casting his surrogate son aside by singing “On a Slow Boat to China” to him — unexpectedly moving. By contrast, the Anderson of One Battle of Another seems more invested in storytelling and movement at the expense of character. Though this latest film may be Anderson’s most successful in terms of awards, history may cast a more measured judgment on a film that strikes me as, at best, merely a well-made, if overlong, action thriller with self-congratulatory airs of revolutionary pretension.
