Paul Thomas Anderson is a celebrated filmmaker with double-digit Academy Award nominations for movies like There Will Be Blood and Licorice Pizza. Whether you’re just getting into Anderson’s collection or have seen all of his best movies, there’s a new project hitting the 2025 movie calendar. One Battle After Another is an epic action thriller with an impressive cast, and critics are here to share their thoughts ahead of its September 26 release.
Leonardo DiCaprio stars in One Battle After Another as an ex-revolutionary who must reunite with his former colleagues to rescue his daughter from a corrupt military official (Sean Penn). The film also stars Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor and more. Steven Spielberg gave his stamp of approval, but what about the other critics? IndieWire’s David Ehrlich gives it an A, writing:
This propulsive, hilarious, and overwhelmingly tender paranoid comedy-thriller car chase blockbuster whatever doesn’t just stare a broken country in the face with its already prescient tale of immigrant detention centers, white nationalist caricatures, and bullshit pretenses for deploying the military into sanctuary cities. It’s also the first movie of its size to accurately crystallize how fucking anxious it feels to be alive right now — to capture the IMAX cartoonishness of our reality and provide a convincing roadmap as to how we might survive it.
Adam Nayman of The Ringer says One Battle After Another is the director at his best, agreeing with Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio Del Toro that this should win Paul Thomas Anderson his first Academy Award. Nayman writes:
The hype is real. There are sequences here so fluid and lucid—so controlled in terms of composition, cutting, and the hurtling, all-in sensation theorized by film scholar David Bordwell as ‘intensified continuity’—that remaining skeptics may feel obliged to bend the knee. The messaging is basically: Start polishing that overdue Best Director Oscar now or don’t give it out at all.
Richard Lawson of THR calls the film “bracingly timely,” as the story boldly addresses the political “nightmare” we face today and speaks directly to the audience about how we must help each other. The critic says:
One Battle After Another is the rare American film released in these benighted times of ours — with the backing of a major studio, no less — to be clear and insistent in the target of its anger, its despair and its prescriptions for what might make things better. Anderson does not operate with blinkered hope; his movie pays sober reverence to the brutal losses suffered already and to those inevitably to come. But he insists, in his film’s glorious and just-shy-of-corny final seconds, that there is still something like a future out there, past the smoke and ruin, worth struggling toward, inch by agonizing inch. The title of the film could be read as an exhausted lament. It could be a rallying cry, too.
Owen Gleiberman of Variety knows the descriptions of One Battle After Another sound aggressively dystopian — like an over-the-top satirical warning of where the world is today and where it might be heading. However, he continues:
The surprise of One Battle After Another is that while it speaks with a big vision to the danger and anxiety of our moment, it’s also a drama that’s totally grounded and relatable. There’s a thematic heft to it, and the movie is often quite funny in a sidelong way, but it’s not some in-your-face didactic absurdist thing. One Battle After Another is a vision of a society in captivity, but it’s a movie that never loses the pulse of its humanity.
Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com points out that while Vineland by Thomas Pynchon was set in the 1980s, PTA’s loosely interpreted book-to-screen adaptation will read as 2020s political commentary because of the story’s timelessness. Tallerico rates the film a perfect 4 out of 4 stars and says:
Anderson’s phenomenal screenplay is a timeless story of resistance, one that playfully weaves together influences as broad-reaching as the true story of Weather Underground and cinematic depictions of rebellion, but it’s also a remarkably propulsive, fun, and eventually moving piece of work about the human beings caught up in the chaotic machine. It’s a live wire that drops in the first scene, setting off sparks for the next 162 minutes.
Critics across the board agree with the above reviews, with One Battle After Another being declared Certified Fresh with a 98% Rotten Tomatoes score from more than 160 submissions. If you want to see the latest project from Paul Thomas Anderson and decide for yourself if you think it’s award-worthy, you can do so starting Friday, September 26.