One Battle After Another is the must-see film of 2025: just ask pretty much anyone who’s seen it. The film – a kinetic, startlingly funny blockbuster adapted loosely from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland – may well be the best-reviewed film of the decade. Five-star reviews abound, as do utterances of the word “masterpiece”. For Paul Thomas Anderson, the man already responsible for a handful of this century’s very best films – There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012) and Phantom Thread (2017), among them – One Battle constitutes an emphatic fulfilment of the promise he first showed as a precocious 26-year-old directing 1997’s Boogie Nights.
Made on a reported budget of at least $130m, One Battle sees Leonardo DiCaprio play a ground-down ex-revolutionary, living in hiding under the name “Bob Ferguson” while raising his teenage daughter Willa (Hollywood newcomer Chase Infiniti). Into the picture comes old adversary Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a warped, brittle army colonel with a white nationalist fanaticism and a sexual obsession with Willa’s in-the-wind Black mother (Teyona Taylor). In a year when a number of prominent movies, from Sinners to Eddington through Superman, have sought to explore the fractious political climate in the US – with varying degrees of sophistication and with varying success – One Battle stands apart in the starkness and potency of its messaging. It is somehow a dozen things at once: a raucous comic satire; a drum-tight action thriller; a tender father-daughter drama. That the reviews have been so unanimously effusive is a testament to how well it melds these seemingly disparate sensibilities. Just one question remains: is anyone actually going to see it?
