For most of the last twenty-five years, Paul Thomas Anderson has been stuck in the past. Well, maybe not stuck; there’s no quagmire in making some of the best movies of our still-young (if rapidly approaching a quarter-life crisis) century, which don’t need to be explicitly contemporary to feel connected to the current moment. But it’s striking to consider that until One Battle After Another, only one of those movies was actually set in this century, and it was released at a time now distant enough to have been depicted in a period piece. Indeed, the opening scenes of One Battle After Another, set roughly 16 years before the majority of the film, are still later on the timeline than anything else Anderson has made so far, unfolding sometime around or just after the 2008 presidential election.
Not that the election is mentioned. Anderson’s first non-period movie since Punch-Drunk Love doesn’t precisely take place in an instantly recognizable political present, or past. It’s more of a disoriented dream world, and not in the reverie-like way that he chronicled 1973 in his previous film, the instant classic Licorice Pizza. There are moments from the dystopia-adjacent Battle that feel like they could be happening in ’73, or at least a movie version thereof, but it’s not exactly Quentin Tarantino-level alternate history, either.
One Battle After Another takes its inspiration from the 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, apparently with vastly less fidelity than Anderson’s previous Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice—starting with the fact that Vineland was set in 1984, concerning ex-hippie types hunted by a federal agent. The film’s rechristened lead Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) also has a radical past, depicted in detail in the film’s opening section, as the explosives man for a revolutionary group called the French 75. While he believes in the cause, his devotion fails to match that of the fierier Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor)—though his devotion to Perfidia herself is considerable. Around the time their child is born, the group is being systematically hunted down by the tireless Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn).
This and other circumstances separate Bob, Perfidia, and the other French 75 members. 16 years later, Bob is raising the couple’s teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) in the small town of Baktan Cross and the relative seclusion it provides. Provides for Bob, anyway. Willa goes to public school and has a small, loyal friend group privy to the details of her secret, contraband cell phone; she lives her life with her dad hovering over her shoulder from their isolated cabin, paranoid about her safety (and skeptical about her whole generation). When Lockjaw re-emerges, on a mission to prove himself worthy to join a secret society of white supremacists, Bob is forced out of the house and back into fumbling, drug-addled action to save his daughter. Anderson has cited the Mission: Impossible movies as an unlikely inspiration, specifically for Bob’s mighty struggle to remember the old “codespeak” that will hook him back into the still-extant revolutionary network. Imagine, in other words, if Ethan Hunt were actually 60, instead of aging on Cruise Time. One Battle After Another also resembles Taken, if the middle-aged guy’s particular set of skills mainly involved running to a karate instructor and begging him for assistance. (Understandable, though, when said instructor is played by Benicio del Toro.)
Yet it would be misleading to describe One Battle After Another as an action picture, at least in contemporary terms. That’s where 1973 or thereabouts rears its head. The movie plays like a much-vaunted action classic from the 1970s that young film buffs catch up with decades later and realize actually has about 10 minutes’ worth of impressive analog car and foot chases in between a lot of dialogue scenes, plot points, and colorful side characters. There’s even a specific series of shots, with the camera whooshing through hilly roads like a sprawling rollercoaster, that would probably constitute the most famous moment from this movie if it were half a century old. This is not a knock against One Battle After Another, which also sneaks in elements of a revisionist Western. If anything, the movie represents a smart redirecting of Anderson’s gift for momentum.
That’s a quality more closely associated with the movies Anderson made in his and/or his characters’ youth, one intentionally put aside for his previous Pynchon adaptation and Phantom Thread, then reclaimed for a giddy series of hangout adventures in Licorice Pizza. So it’s an inspired bit of semi-meta-casting to send 50-year-old ex-idol DiCaprio (playing a little younger here, but not by a lot) hurtling through a forbidding landscape of barren storefronts, winding roads, and wide-open spaces, cranky as hell about passcodes and younger people and a life spent mentally if not physically on the run. The sweaty try-hard actorliness that sometimes dogged DiCaprio in his youth has more recently been converted into the poignant comedy of aging guys who bluster strenuously about being in over their heads. DiCaprio revives his Wolf Of Wall Street slapstick talents as he scrambles through the frame, taking some cartoonishly dangerous falls while rocking a pair of stolen shades and a skull cap. Stepping into a funhouse-mirror reflection of The Searchers results in one of his best performances.
Anderson strikes a near-impossible balance throughout One Battle After Another: Somehow, he manages to kid Bob’s burnt-out ex-hippie mentality (with attendant undertones of conspiracy-crank conservatism), examine the foibles of Perfidia’s principled yet far-from-spotless radical, satirize the deranged white nationalism that has been on a re-emboldened march for the entire span this movie covers, and work up some genuinely righteous thrills watching the French 75 bust a bunch of detained immigrants out of queasily familiar-looking facilities. (That this is depicted happening in the late 2000s, not 2025, is best interpreted as a reminder of this country’s pervasively racist legacy rather than any temporal fudging.) The thread that emerges most clearly for those crisscrossing lines—though viewers’ mileage will surely vary on this—concerns a pair of contradictory impulses: to remake the world for our hypothetical children, and to retreat in order to better protect our actual children when that world stubbornly refuses to improve. Though he never puts it in such gendered terms, Bob’s “as the father of a daughter” neuroses reach a fever pitch that’s both funny and, eventually, quite moving.
DiCaprio is so terrific, and Infiniti such a charismatic find, that viewers may find themselves wishing the cast, both principal and supporting (which also includes Regina Hall and Alana Haim), had room in this 162-minute movie to bounce off of each other with a little more frequency. (Penn and DiCaprio are among the flashy actor combinations that don’t really ever share the screen.) At times, the movie feels surprisingly spare considering its scope of time, locations, and characters. But this may also be part of Anderson’s design, contributing to the Western vibes of the occasional shoot-outs or sieges while the title alludes to the lack of climactic-showdown finality (even while staging a hell of a climactic showdown). One Battle After Another hurtles into the present without compromising Anderson’s sense of fractured, constantly rearranged, weirdly personal American history.
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall
Release Date: September 26, 2025
