The term “masterpiece” gets bandied about a little too casually these days, but director Paul Thomas Anderson has no less than three in his filmography (the choice of which ones is obviously a source of furious debate amongst cinephiles). His latest feature, the darkly comic action thriller One Battle After Another, can confidently be counted as yet another.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a former member of a radical revolutionary group whose past violently comes back to haunt him, One Battle After Another is a sprawling and ambitious epic that Anderson — who wrote, produced, and directed the film — has been trying to make for decades. Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern novel Vineland, which told a freewheeling saga about counterculture America from the ‘60s through the Reagan era, One Battle After Another is a bracingly relevant, breathlessly propulsive, and deeply layered thriller that manages to transcend its source material. On top of that, it’s entertaining as hell.
