Margot gives it: ★★★★½
I think it’s fair to say that when beloved big-idea director Paul Thomas Anderson made his first adaptation of a novel by beloved big-idea writer Thomas Pynchon, 2014’s Inherent Vice, he failed to hit a cultural nerve. While the movie has its fans, its stilted, highly literary screenplay feels inert on the screen.
One Battle After Another is something else again. A very loose adaptation of Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland — Anderson uses the term “inspired by” — this thriller-esque drama may have been released at the exact moment for maximum relevance. Already, young people on social media are mining it for its kinetic imagery of political resistance.
The deal
A revolutionary leftist group called the French 75 frees immigrants from detention centers, blows up cell towers and bombs federal offices. Front and center is a bold, theatrical operative who calls herself Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), assisted behind the scenes by her explosive-specialist boyfriend, Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio). He doesn’t know about Perfidia’s perilous side entanglement with army officer Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn).
When the French 75 goes south, Lockjaw helps Perfidia flee to witness protection. Pat disappears into a false identity, “Bob Ferguson,” with the couple’s infant daughter.
Sixteen years later, Bob is a grouchy fortysomething stoner raising teenage Willa (Chase Infiniti). The now Colonel Lockjaw mounts an urban invasion to hunt down father and daughter, believing that Willa is actually his — and that her existence is the only thing standing between him and membership in a white supremacist sect called the Christmas Adventurers Club.
A devoted dad, Bob can’t let Willa be harmed. But his days of fighting the power are long gone.
Will you like it?
One Battle After Another is a big, bold, visually exciting movie, even when you can’t see it in IMAX or as it was shot, in VistaVision. Anderson fills the whole screen with deftly orchestrated action in a real-feeling world, assisted by skilled production design. It’s an invigorating reminder that movie thrills don’t have to have the weightlessness of CGI or martial-arts wire work.
Not for nothing does Anderson show Bob watching The Battle of Algiers, the progenitor of leftist action movies. One highlight of One Battle After Another is a panoramic set piece in which regular people mobilize against the military invasion of a sanctuary city, ending in a skateboard-assisted rooftop chase. Another is a car chase on a hilly road, equally immersive and old-school in its approach.
While the setting has a drab realism, the characters loom larger than life. Penn’s sweaty, twitchy Lockjaw is a memorably nasty creation, teeming with urges he can’t avow. A few years ago, it might have been tempting to dismiss him and his power broker friends as satirical caricatures. Now they barely seem like exaggerations.
As for Bob, he’s no Liam Neeson-style action dad, more of a hapless everyman — and comic relief — than the story’s hero. The task of humanizing the revolution falls to a no-nonsense Regina Hall, as a surviving French 75 member who hides Willa among pot-growing nuns; and Benicio Del Toro, as an unflappably chill community organizer who comes to Bob’s aid. The little dance Del Toro does while being frisked by cops is a throwaway delight.
Taylor plays a revolutionary icon perfect for dorm-room posters — who could forget the vignette of a very pregnant Perfidia spraying the desert with bullets? But Perfidia’s motivations remain foggy, perhaps because she’s been detached from the historical context that shaped her inspiration.
Pynchon’s Vineland is explicitly about the jarring transition from the ’60s to the Ronald Reagan era. The Perfidia character (Frenesi in the book) represents what was lost in the process — youthful freedom with an anarchic, chaotic edge. By contrast, One Battle After Another takes place in a nowish period that features both cellphones and pay phones. A voice-over informs us that “nothing much has changed” in the 16 years since Willa’s birth.
While Anderson clearly didn’t want to make a period piece, removing that vital context robs the central plotline of its emotional pull. In the film’s world, revolution and reaction seem to happen in rapid succession, or even simultaneously — hence the exhausting repetition implied by the title.
That premise may be more relevant to today’s rapid news cycle than Pynchon’s ambivalent nostalgia could possibly be. With Infiniti playing an inspirational Gen Z heroine, One Battle After Another looks more to the future than the past. Yet it also taps into ’60s iconography to make armed revolution look exciting and viable.
Anderson has certainly made the most fun leftist movie in a while, but his expansive tale never explores why, as Perfidia acknowledges at one point, the revolution “failed.” For better or worse, the movie is all high, no hangover.
If you like this, try…
The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008; Kanopy, PLEX, Pluto TV, Prime Video, Roku Channel, Tubi, rentable): For a more historical view of violent leftism than One Battle presents, try this kinetic German period piece about the exploits of the Red Army Faction in the 1970s.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022; Disney+, Hulu, Kanopy, rentable): On the contemporary side, Daniel Goldhaber’s story of fictional eco-activists is both a message movie and an exhilarating thriller.
Eddington (2025; rentable): It’s impossible not to compare One Battle with Ari Aster’s small-town drama about COVID-19 lockdown turmoil. Both feel like an auteur’s sprawling, sometimes-tortured effort to make sense of what’s happening in the U.S. right now.
This article appears in Oct 1-7 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!