About two dozen movies have topped the box office in 2025, and it’s safe to say that Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is the only one that depicts its protagonists freeing arrested immigrants from detention centers. The movie doesn’t face much competition for the title of most political weekend-topper of the year; superhero pictures such as Captain America: Brave New World perpetually tell the most anodyne stories possible, even when they’re supposedly about Washington-based conspiracies; Sinners conceals some of its bigger ideas within a crime-and-horror vampire story; even Mickey 17, another riskily expensive Warner Bros movie from a beloved auteur with political overtones, has genre-movie trappings. On the other hand, some rightwing pundits suggested in all seriousness that Warner should have delayed the release of Anderson’s movie in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting, wondering if the movie was an incitement to political violence.
Some fans of the movie have described it in similar terms, too; not as an incitement to violence, but as the rare major-studio project bold enough to endorse a more pointed political position than “we can all agree that extremist-fostered racism can, in certain circumstances, sometimes be dangerous to some people, maybe.” (Honestly, in the wake of Kirk’s death, that too might be described as a radical call for insurrection.) Yet One Battle After Another is a little thornier than it first appears; that’s part of what makes it such an exciting work.
