Paul Thomas Anderson is a celebrated filmmaker with double-digit Academy Award nominations for films like There Will Be Blood and Licorice Pizza. Whether or not you’re simply stepping into Anderson’s assortment or have seen all of his finest films, there’s a brand new venture hitting the 2025 film calendar. One Battle After One other is an epic motion thriller with a formidable solid, and critics are right here to share their ideas forward of its September 26 launch.
Leonardo DiCaprio stars in One Battle After One other as an ex-revolutionary who should reunite along with his former colleagues to rescue his daughter from a corrupt navy official (Sean Penn). The movie additionally stars Benicio del Toro, Regina Corridor, Teyana Taylor and extra. Steven Spielberg gave his stamp of approval, however what concerning the different critics? IndieWire’s David Ehrlich provides it an A, writing:
This propulsive, hilarious, and overwhelmingly tender paranoid comedy-thriller automotive chase blockbuster no matter doesn’t simply stare a damaged nation within the face with its already prescient story of immigrant detention facilities, white nationalist caricatures, and bullshit pretenses for deploying the navy into sanctuary cities. It’s additionally the primary film of its measurement to precisely crystallize how fucking anxious it feels to be alive proper now — to seize the IMAX cartoonishness of our actuality and supply a convincing roadmap as to how we’d survive it.
Adam Nayman of The Ringer says One Battle After One other is the director at his finest, agreeing with Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio Del Toro that this could win Paul Thomas Anderson his first Academy Award. Nayman writes:
The hype is actual. There are sequences right here so fluid and lucid—so managed when it comes to composition, slicing, and the hurtling, all-in sensation theorized by movie scholar David Bordwell as ‘intensified continuity’—that remaining skeptics might really feel obliged to bend the knee. The messaging is principally: Begin sharpening that overdue Finest Director Oscar now or don’t give it out in any respect.
Richard Lawson of THR calls the movie “bracingly well timed,” because the story boldly addresses the political “nightmare” we face at this time and speaks on to the viewers about how we should assist one another. The critic says:
One Battle After One other is the uncommon American movie launched in these benighted instances of ours — with the backing of a serious studio, no much less — to be clear and insistent within the goal of its anger, its despair and its prescriptions for what would possibly make issues higher. Anderson doesn’t function with blinkered hope; his film pays sober reverence to the brutal losses suffered already and to these inevitably to return. However he insists, in his movie’s wonderful and just-shy-of-corny ultimate seconds, that there’s nonetheless one thing like a future on the market, previous the smoke and smash, value struggling towards, inch by agonizing inch. The title of the movie could possibly be learn as an exhausted lament. It could possibly be a rallying cry, too.
Owen Gleiberman of Selection is aware of the descriptions of One Battle After One other sound aggressively dystopian — like an over-the-top satirical warning of the place the world is at this time and the place it is perhaps heading. Nevertheless, he continues:
The shock of One Battle After One other is that whereas it speaks with a giant imaginative and prescient to the hazard and nervousness of our second, it’s additionally a drama that’s completely grounded and relatable. There’s a thematic heft to it, and the film is commonly fairly humorous in a sidelong method, but it surely’s not some in-your-face didactic absurdist factor. One Battle After One other is a imaginative and prescient of a society in captivity, but it surely’s a film that by no means loses the heart beat of its humanity.
Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com factors out that whereas Vineland by Thomas Pynchon was set within the Nineteen Eighties, PTA’s loosely interpreted book-to-screen adaptation will learn as 2020s political commentary due to the story’s timelessness. Tallerico charges the movie an ideal 4 out of 4 stars and says:
Anderson’s phenomenal screenplay is a timeless story of resistance, one which playfully weaves collectively influences as broad-reaching because the true story of Climate Underground and cinematic depictions of rebel, but it surely’s additionally a remarkably propulsive, enjoyable, and finally shifting piece of labor concerning the human beings caught up within the chaotic machine. It’s a dwell wire that drops within the first scene, setting off sparks for the subsequent 162 minutes.
Critics throughout the board agree with the above opinions, with One Battle After One other being declared Licensed Recent with a 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating from greater than 160 submissions. If you wish to see the newest venture from Paul Thomas Anderson and resolve for your self if you happen to suppose it’s award-worthy, you are able to do so beginning Friday, September 26.