One Battle After Another

One Battle After Another marks Paul Thomas Anderson's return to a more explicitly political, action-driven register after the wistful Licorice Pizza, loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, a former member of a radical revolutionary collective who has spent years living under a false identity with his teenage daughter Willa, played by newcomer Chase Infiniti. When Colonel Steven Lockjaw, an old enemy played by Sean Penn, resurfaces from the past, father and daughter are forced to flee across an America gripped by racial tension, state surveillance and far-right militias, while Bob desperately tries to find Willa after the two are separated.

The cast also includes Benicio del Toro as a mysterious martial-arts master and underground leader, along with Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor. Anderson builds a tightly paced film with a considerable runtime, over two hours and forty minutes, alternating dizzying action sequences, including a hillside car chase repeatedly cited by critics as one of the year's most technically virtuosic set pieces, with a dark humor that offsets the story's political tension. The film explores fatherhood, historical memory and resistance with a satirical eye on contemporary American institutions, while never losing sight of the bond between Bob and Willa as the story's true emotional core.

Critics received the film with near-unanimous acclaim, calling it among the most ambitious and accomplished works of Anderson's career, with particular praise for DiCaprio's physical, comic performance and Penn's icy turn. Some observers noted the film's length and narrative complexity as possible hurdles for mainstream audiences, a criticism that nonetheless did not stop the film from becoming one of the season's most awarded titles, winning numerous accolades including the Best Picture Oscar, and generating wide discussion despite a more modest commercial performance than initially expected.