If the cinematic landscape of 2025 were a desert, One Battle After Another is absolute water. It is an ambitious undertaking on the part of writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson, who manages to weave a solid action thriller with timely themes and puts characters that are not clotheslines for the thrilling moments, but rather actual humans who strive for the same universal ideals: Freedom and love.
Leonardo DiCaprio delivers another stellar, powerful performance as Bob Ferguson, a former revolutionary with the vigilante group known as the French 75. Teyana Taylor costars as Bob’s partner, Perfidia, and they give birth to a daughter named Willa.
Perfidia decides that she would rather be loyal to the cause of the French 75 rather than have a family, so she abandons Bob and Willa. Sixteen years later, Bob lives as a shell of his former self and has a dysfunctional relationship with his daughter (Chase Infiniti). They live in the sanctuary city known as Baktan Cross as Bob becomes increasingly paranoid of the world around him, and especially his daughter’s every movement.
Sean Penn costars as Colonel Steven Lockjaw, who has a connection to Bob and the French 75. What his connection is, I won’t reveal. He embarks on an operation to bring down Bob and anyone else connected to him. Penn brings a menacing presence to his role as a man who is this relentless attacking machine.
Bob must endure a series of trials and tribulations after Lockjaw kidnaps his daughter, and some sequences have a realistic intensity. In contrast, others offer genuine belly laughs, such as Bob trying to discover a rendezvous point with the assistance of the French 75, but can’t quite answer the cryptic questions posed to him over a pay phone.
Benicio Del Toro delivers effective work as a martial arts sensei and provides Bob with a weapon as he begins his journey to find his daughter. Del Toro doesn’t have many scenes, but he and DiCaprio share the biggest laughs in the entire film, especially when Bob is so whacked out by the aforementioned cryptic questions that Del Toro has to keep him centered, and that doesn’t always work.
One Battle After Another features a virtuoso filmmaker like PTA at the top of his form. Inspired by the novel Vineyard by Thomas Pynchon, he takes this story, which is probably not ripped out of today’s headlines, and makes certain commentaries that will rile up either side of the political fence, depending on their point of view.
It is impossible to ignore the parallels between our own world and the plot developments in the movie, but Anderson never forgets to craft something that is bound to exhilarate.
DiCaprio, Penn, and Del Toro deliver unsurprisingly outstanding performances as individuals with their own agendas: to either evade capture and keep moving forward or exact their own form of justice on a determined enemy. All three of them deserve Oscar consideration for the monumental amount of gravity they bring to their roles.
Chase Infiniti is also a standout as a girl who wants to live her own life but has a father who constantly puts her under the microscope to ensure she doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, which she inevitably does. She’s not the typical damsel in distress and brings qualities that raise the stakes and avoid the typical cliches.
Some sequences have a Tarantino vibe. Others have a Coen Brothers vibe. However, Anderson is telling a story of his own that is consistently tense and thrilling throughout, with performances that punctuate the madness of what each of these characters goes through.
One Battle After Another always feels like an authentic cinematic experience, and for the rest of 2025, it’s the film to beat.
