No one can say that Paul Thomas Anderson lacks ambition. Even the director’s smaller films are full of big ideas and breathtaking visuals, and he never puts anything less than the full weight of his substantial talent into any of his movies.
That’s why I can always appreciate an Anderson movie even if I don’t particularly like it, and I found myself appreciating and admiring his new film “One Battle After Another” a bit more than I liked it. It is often fascinating and occasionally heartbreaking, but it’s also kind of a sprawling mess, with a story split across two time periods, 16 years apart.
