TL;DR: PTA made a three-hour action-comedy-drama-revolutionary fever dream with DiCaprio as a washed-up stoner dad, Penn as a terrifying authoritarian, and Chase Infiniti as the breakout star you’ll be talking about all year. It’s messy, it’s brilliant, and it’s one of 2025’s must-see films.

I’ve lived long enough with Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies that they’ve started to feel less like discrete works and more like seasonal markers in my own life. Every few years, he drops another film, and I’m forced to measure who I was the last time I sat in a theater under his spell against who I am now. There Will Be Blood was the first PTA film I saw in a packed cinema, and I still remember the palpable silence when Daniel Day-Lewis declared he’d abandoned his boy. Phantom Thread made me think about relationships in ways my twenty-something self wasn’t ready to admit. And Inherent Vice—well, I was pretty baked for that one, which is exactly how PTA wanted me to be. But One Battle After Another, his newest and most sprawling work, feels different. It doesn’t just land as another movie in his canon; it feels like the movie he’s been building toward for decades. It’s bold, messy, tender, furious, and absurdly funny. It’s a three-hour fever dream of revolution, family, and the impossible weight of history, and yes—I’m going to say it—it feels like a generational masterpiece.

The setup sounds like pulp on paper. A ragtag group of radicals called the French 75 plan an audacious jailbreak at the US-Mexico border. Leonardo DiCaprio, playing Bob Ferguson with the stumbling charm of a man who peaked at 25, is their explosives guy. His partner, Perfidia Beverly Hills (a ferocious Teyana Taylor), is the group’s beating heart—equal parts revolutionary firebrand and stylish tactician. Sean Penn arrives as Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, the kind of villain who thinks he’s the main character in his own righteous epic. Before you can settle in, there’s a baby, betrayals, and a fast-forward sixteen years to Bob as a washed-up single dad in California, drinking and smoking his way into oblivion while trying to raise his daughter, Willa (a breakout Chase Infiniti). All the while, Lockjaw—still nursing his obsession with Perfidia—is closing in.

What could’ve been a straightforward action film becomes, under Anderson’s gaze, something stranger, richer, and more alive. He treats action the way he once treated oil drilling or porn shoots: as a lens into human desperation and absurdity. A mid-film sequence where Benicio del Toro’s Sergio juggles protecting hidden immigrants with ferrying Bob out of town plays like a high-wire act of tone. It’s tense, hilarious, and unexpectedly humane—all stitched together with Anderson’s signature ability to cut between chaos and stillness without losing the thread.

And let’s talk about DiCaprio. For decades, he’s been Hollywood’s golden boy, but Anderson weaponizes his movie-star magnetism against him. Bob is perpetually unshaven, perpetually high, perpetually screwing things up. He’s a man whose revolutionary fire has been reduced to embers, and DiCaprio plays him like a stoner Doc Sportello tossed unwillingly into a Michael Mann film. But beneath the sloppiness, he’s a dad who loves his daughter more than he loves himself, and that pathos cuts deep. By the time he stumbles into genuine heroism, you don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or light up with him.

Penn, meanwhile, chews the scenery as Lockjaw in ways that should feel campy but instead land with eerie menace. He’s terrifying not because he’s a cartoon villain but because he’s a painfully familiar one—the kind of man who mistakes cruelty for strength and power for destiny. If he occasionally slips into uncanny RFK Jr. mannerisms, that’s no accident. Teyana Taylor is a revelation, infusing Perfidia with an unpredictability that makes every scene crackle. And then there’s Chase Infiniti. In her debut role, she delivers a performance so confident, so emotionally grounded, that she often feels like the film’s true center of gravity. Willa isn’t just Bob’s daughter; she’s the hope that Anderson is dangling in front of us, a glimpse of what might be salvageable in a world choking on its own corruption.

The craft is jaw-dropping. Michael Bauman’s cinematography shifts between sun-drenched warmth and icy precision, creating a visual tug-of-war between intimacy and authoritarian control. Jonny Greenwood’s score, all nerve-fraying strings and unexpected bursts of melancholy, doesn’t just accompany scenes—it dictates your heartbeat. PTA has always had a way of making films feel lived-in, but here, with his largest budget yet, he paints on a canvas so sprawling it veers into neo-Western territory. Empty highways become battlegrounds. Quiet kitchens become confessionals. Even the car chase that unfolds like a slow burn across desolate roads is thrilling in its restraint.

Watching One Battle After Another, I kept thinking about how Anderson has always been a chronicler of American contradictions. From the porn industry’s glossy exploitation to the oil baron’s ruthless capitalism to the cult leader’s desperate charisma, he’s obsessed with systems of power and the broken people caught within them. Here, adapting Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, he sharpens that obsession into something uncomfortably close to the present. The French 75’s doomed revolution, Bob’s stoner retreat from responsibility, Lockjaw’s delusional authoritarianism—it all feels like a funhouse mirror version of our headlines. And yet, the film never collapses under its own heaviness. It’s funny, often absurdly so. It’s playful in its chaos, reminding us that satire is sometimes the only way to survive reality.

Is it perfect? No. The sprawl can be overwhelming, and not every subplot lands with equal force. Regina Hall, excellent in her limited screen time, deserves more. Some viewers will find the tonal shifts jarring. But that’s the point. Life is jarring. Revolutions are messy. Parenthood is absurd. To demand neatness from a PTA film is to miss the fun of watching him turn the screws on narrative form until it squeaks.

Walking out of the theater, I felt like I’d been both entertained and warned. Entertained by a filmmaker at the height of his craft, finally letting loose in the action sandbox. Warned by a story that insists the battles of the past keep repeating themselves, one after another, until we find a way to break the cycle. Maybe that’s why the film lingers long after the credits roll—it’s not just about Bob and Willa, or the French 75, or Lockjaw’s hubris. It’s about us, right now, fumbling our way through history with the same mix of fear, love, and desperation.

Verdict:

One Battle After Another is Paul Thomas Anderson’s most ambitious film yet, a sprawling mix of action, satire, and heartfelt family drama that cements his reputation as one of the greatest living directors. It’s uneven, sure, but gloriously so—a generational work that captures the absurdity and terror of our times with wit and compassion. Not everyone will love it, but everyone will feel it.