One Battle After Another review: "One of the best studio movies in years and an instant classic"

If you ever watched the likes of Boogie Nights, Magnolia or There Will Be Blood (pick your Paul Thomas Anderson masterpiece), and wondered: "What could this guy do with a blockbuster budget?", One Battle After Another is the supremely satisfying answer to that very question. On the pulse and thrillingly propulsive, One Battle is ambitious and rewarding in a way that most contemporary tentpoles can only dream.

Reported to have cost upwards of $150m (for reference, that's two Morbiuses), every cent of that comic-book-movie budget is on screen. Loosely based on the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, One Battle is the decades-spanning story of a modern American revolutionary front and their often-violent conflict with US Army Captain Steven J. Lockjaw (an unhinged Sean Penn). Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as 'rocket man' Bob Ferguson, the sprawling story eventually settles its focus on the 'Sanctuary City' of Batkan Cross, where Bob and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) are pursued by Lockjaw, as riots erupt on the streets.

Operating on a scale that eclipses the oil fields of There Will Be Blood, or the salt flats of The Master, One Battle's astonishing scope and pinballing narrative encompasses 16-year time jumps, comic call center interludes, and one of the most creative car chases ever committed to the screen. Appreciate it while it's here, because One Battle is the kind of film that big studios almost never bankroll.

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The fight stuff

Of course, it helps when you have DiCaprio as your leading man. Teaming with Anderson for the first time, DiCaprio's Ferguson isn't a million miles away from the stoner archetype of Inherent Vice's Doc. A former war hero turned lovable loser in a dressing gown who's fried his brain and can't remember the code words from the revolutionary texts, Bob bounces from one explosive encounter to the next largely oblivious and with a singular goal in mind: to find Willa before Lockjaw can get his hands on her.

Benicio Del Toro offers similarly comic support as karate Sensei Sergio, a revolutionary comrade who helps Bob hide and escape the city under the cover of darkness, typcially while talking on the phone in untranslated Spanish to an unseen person on the other end of the line. It's chaotic and then some, but never more chaotic than when Penn's Lockjaw is on screen. The film's second-lead, Lockjaw is a monstrously repulsive creation, a self-loathing white supremacist who has a personal motivation to track down Bob and Willa, and isn't afraid to allocate considerable military resources in that pursuit.

Lockjaw's life is changed during an early encounter with Willa's mother, Perfida Beverly (Teyanna Taylor). Perfida is the burning engine of the revolutionary front, but gets a little too close to the flames. Underutilised on screen since her pivot to acting in 2021, Taylor's Perfida is the kind of calling card character that should see the musician-turned-actor at the top of casting wishlists for years to come. Her absence is keenly felt in the back half of the film, but the phantom pain works to the movie's benefit.

Talkin' 'bout a revolution

Featuring shootouts, police pursuits and bank robberies, One Battle is inarguably Anderson's most commercial movie, but it nevertheless starts with idealistic political revolutionaries bombing government institutions in the name of progress. It's a radical and provocative reflection of our current moment, pointedly opening with a rescue at an immigration center on the US-Mexico border, and featuring a shadowy cabal of 'Christmas Adventurers' who want to 'find dangerous lunatics and stop them'.

That Anderson snuck all this into a studio tentpole is nothing short of a miracle. One Battle is the kind of film that hasn't really existed since the 1970s, and has been fully extinct since the dawn of Marvel in the late 2000s. It's somewhat fitting, then, that the film has been shot on richly textured VistaVision film stock – the high-resolution format that's been dormant since the early 1960s, but is currently in the midst of a major comeback (ushered in by last year's awards player, The Brutalist). Coupled with composer Johnny Greenwood's astonishing score, which covers the gamut from anxiety-inducing atonal drones to soaring piano compositions, One Battle is an overwhelming sensory experience.

Clocking in at over 2.5 hours and often willfully misanthropic, One Battle almost certainly won't be to everyone's tastes. But it's a clear frontrunner for film of the year, full of bravura filmmaking, and another Paul Thomas Anderson masterpiece to add to the ever-expanding list. Whether it will net blockbuster returns to match that mega-budget remains to be seen, but it hardly matters when the result is a film that will last forever.

For more, check out our list of the most exciting upcoming movies in 2025 and beyond, or, skip to our list of movie release dates.