Staff writer Thomas Deakin reviews Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest film One Battle After Another, arguing it’s his greatest since Punch-Drunk Love
Since his highly successful and Altmanesque second feature, Boogie Nights (1997), Paul Thomas Anderson has been obsessed with making movies about the zeitgeist of the American population at certain points in time. These attempts started out as highly energetic, sprawling and emotional “coke kid” explorations of interpersonal relationships with the aforementioned Boogie Nights and the San Fernando Valley epic Magnolia (1999) before reaching an arguable career peak with the more intimately personal, yet still wildly kinetic and unpredictable, Punch Drunk-Love (2002). Then, as his reputation skyrocketed, he mutated into a “weed dad” auteur focused on five tales of self-destructive perfectionists that rapidly diminished in quality from the near-perfect There Will Be Blood (2007) up to the weightless failure of a hangout movie that is Licorice Pizza (2021). Eventually, it seemed as if this shift in identity would self-immolate his career without synthesising his current mode of filmic construction with his earlier and more radical style to create something new and perhaps even revolutionary. Thankfully, as has been argued in a widely circulated Letterboxd review by critic Matt Lynch, this moment of salvation has arrived and resurrected his career from its buried tomb with the truly astonishing and timely masterwork that is 2025’s One Battle After Another.
In contrast to his last couple of films, the reason why One Battle After Another matches the quality of his earlier works is because it feels more distinctly personal and genuine instead of trying too hard to reach for sincerity. Similarly to Punch-Drunk Love, this film, at its core, is about the power of love to change people for the better and to motivate them to be their best selves by protecting those they care for at any cost. However, although it isn’t quite as accomplished a movie, One Battle After Another exceeds Punch-Drunk Love in its exploration of a realistic father-daughter dynamic dependent on the father having to learn that his daughter is ultimately able to protect herself from danger instead of always needing to rely on him. Leonardo DiCaprio’s main character of Ghetto Pat/Bob Ferguson could metaphorically be read as a representation of Paul Thomas Anderson himself. Ferguson’s epiphany of discovering that the best version of himself is a synthesis of his revolutionary youth and middle-aged burnout mirrors Anderson’s accepting that no longer being the radical “coke kid” young director he once was should not prevent him from making profound and emotionally engaging art. Furthermore, this message is also expertly conveyed by two other sublimely Oscar-worthy performances from Chase Infiniti as his self-actualised and complex daughter Willa, and especially a career-best performance from Sean Penn as a narcissistic white nationalist Colonel, whose quality of being as funny as he is terrifying makes him feel eerily real.
Much has been written of the possible politics of One Battle After Another and whether or not it truly espouses the ideologies of the left-wing movements that it predominantly focuses on. Whilst some critics and writers including Bret Easton Ellis have derided it as liberal, whereas the New York Times has gone so far as to call it an antifascist movie, I believe that its true politics are much more of the latter than the former viewpoint. Although Anderson does criticise the occasional inefficacy and hypocrisy of left-wing movements when individual desires overtake collective aims, he remains nevertheless broadly sympathetic to their conditional pacifist and anti-imperialist use of necessary violence to save immigrants from persecution and promote equality. It is a sentiment that feels even more prescient and timely now than it must have already felt during the production of the movie, as Donald Trump’s extremely right-wing second administration has used ICE to unfairly deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants including many legal citizens such as Mahmoud Khalil and those with withholding of removal status like Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Additionally, the film vehemently rejects the binary of sex and gender through its portrayal of strong women that refute the gender stereotypes of traditional conservatism. Although its portrayal of non-binary identity through the character of Bobo is admittedly slightly misguided, Anderson still promotes a gender politics of inclusivity that is highly relevant amidst the eradication of trans rights in both the USA and the UK to the extent of persecution through bathroom bills, as highlighted by the Marcy Rheintgen case. Finally, the coincidental worldwide release of this movie just after Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the misappropriation of a white nationalist as a hero for free speech parallels the hypocrisy of the Christmas Adventure Club and Sean Penn’s Steven Lockjaw. The Brechtian absurdity of the Christmas Adventure Club thusly epitomises Anderson’s belief that we are overly forgiving towards neo-Nazi groups whose intentions are forced assimilation instead of love and dialogue through Sean Penn’s sadistic tendencies. Therefore, the politics of One Battle After Another can be characterised as a soft left rejection of the willingness to negotiate of the Biden era in favour of a conditional pacifist determination to use rebellion and resistance as tools to change the world for the many instead of the few. A political statement that is not so radical on the stage of world cinema, but is a rupture in the landscape of modern American blockbuster cinema.
One Battle After Another’s innovative projection has also ruptured the overly digital environment of a modern cinematic landscape that too often sacrifices technological ‘innovation’ for emotional sincerity through its use of horizontal VistaVision. A year after Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist became the first film to be shot entirely in horizontal VistaVision in over 60 years, Anderson’s newest film has exceeded that threshold by not only being shot using that format but also being the first film projected in horizontal VistaVision since 1961. Whilst I unfortunately was not able to book a VistaVision screening of the movie before writing this review (VistaVision screenings in the UK are mostly limited to occasional screenings at the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square), it is certainly a radical statement from a director approaching a potential late style period to use a traditional and seemingly obsolete format to make a film that envisions a positive and active future for both society and cinema itself. Additionally, the VistaVision experience has been widely praised by IndieWire as “simply stunning” for the “colour reproduction”. However, One Battle After Another transcends technical categorisation because it is still an incredible movie in whatever viewing format. As someone who saw both a 70mm Imax print at the BFI Imax and a regular digital commercial package at the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square, I can confirm that the themes, characters and spectacle of the movie are sufficient and rewarding enough that it remains a riveting masterpiece in whatever context it is seen.
In conclusion, One Battle After Another marks a genuinely staggering milestone for both Paul Thomas Anderson’s career and for the state of modern cinema itself. Its ability of being both a timely film that is strikingly relevant in the right-wing culturally conservative era of Trump’s second administration and a universal film about the importance of love and found family communities have given it potential to become a future classic. Amongst other movies from this year by prominent auteurs dealing with our current relationship to nostalgia (Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, Ari Aster’s Eddington, and Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme), One Battle After Another emerges as both the best of those and the best movie of 2025 due to how it offers a positive route out of nostalgia based neither in compromise nor nihilism, but instead in the hope that action can improve our future. For a director who has been trying to emulate the great American filmmaker Robert Altman for his entire career to the extent that most of his early movies just outright copied his style, Paul Thomas Anderson has finally managed to create a movie that simultaneously serves as a palimpsest of numerous Altman masterpieces (Nashville, Brewster McCloud, Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) and as his most personal and original film. It has often been said that Paul Thomas Anderson has aspired to greatness and now, for the first time in decades, he has admirably attained it.
