- Starring
- Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro
- Director
- Paul Thomas Anderson
- Rating
- R
- Genre
- Action, Crime, Drama
- Release date
- Sept 26, 2025
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
After a sixteen-year absence, a shadowy figure from a forgotten revolution resurfaces, pulling a weathered band of former fighters back into a high-stakes conflict. Bound by a tangled family connection, they navigate old wounds and fresh dangers in a relentless struggle against time and enemies.
One Battle After Another Review
Having spent most of the intervening years between There Will Be Blood and now directing music videos, it’s possible that Paul Thomas Anderson has forgotten how to tell a story (I didn’t see Licorice Pizza).
One Battle After Another is nearly three hours of abusive and overly simplistic leftist metaphors haphazardly slapped on screen and couched in the ridiculous and clichéd fever dream of the false mythology that they’ve built around the Right. Anderson is known for his slightly exaggerated storytelling, but in One Battle, he cranks up the dial and unsuccessfully attempts to blend expressionism and realism into a loud yet narratively bland frappuccino of pretentious arthouse trash that mainstream critics will lap up like Obama’s bathwater.
His characters are obnoxious cartoons. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a useless white male loser with no personality beyond pot and panic. Think “The Wolf of Wall Street” sans personality, charisma, or utility. Benicio DelTorro made a name for himself by transforming a meaningless character (Fenster) in The Usual Suspects into the film’s most memorable one. Yet, even he can’t do anything with Anderson’s pointless script, giving us a nothing character who is there and gone before you can remember his name. The only performer who manages to make something of this waste of time is Sean Penn.
Penn plays Col. Lockjaw, a brutal martinet in charge of a contingent of militarized police/immigration enforcement officers. Place your bets now, because not only will his jungle-fevered humiliation-fetishist white supremacist earn him an Oscar nomination for this send-up of ICE agents, but unless a fat one-legged black tranny also gets nominated, he’ll win. Quite frankly, if his character weren’t such a retardedly offensive caricature of an ambitious career soldier, he’d have earned it. He’s completely invested in the brutal soldier. However, if you’ve ever seen an interview with Penn, playing a heartless d!@< with no personality doesn’t exactly seem like a stretch.
He’s a great actor, but Sean Penn is also exactly who you think he is. pic.twitter.com/VcwArVcdMN
— Worth it or Woke? (reviews) (@worthitorwoke) September 23, 2025
As it is, neither Penn’s Lockjaw nor any other character engenders any emotional connection thanks to Anderson’s political meth posing as a story. One would think that a three-hour movie would be worth a review of more than a few hundred words, but as I paced the aisles of the otherwise empty theater in pain while suffering through this monstrosity, one constant refrain echoed in my head: “Nothing is happening.” Oh, sure, characters changed locations and had conversations. Guns were fired, and cars were chased, but through all of the “and this happened nexts” one thing remained constant, I didn’t care.
Anderson needs to go back to music videos.
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James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
The heroes are basically antifa. You can’t get more woke than that.
Oh, if only that were true. Just wait until I finish the review.
I’m guessing the heroes are all ethically diverse men and women (and they/thems) and the villains are all white men. Plus some heavy-handed anti-ice themes. Plus pregnant black woman with a machine gun.
You’re not far off.
thanks. ya just saved me 3 hrs & $20.
This is super disappointing.
You could edit out Leo completely and the movie would be no different. He has zero impact on the plot.
I don’t think I hated it as much as you, even though I hated parts of it. I think there were some bits that had a go at the other side like the Teyana Taylor character being such a terrible mother and didn’t even show loyalty to the cause or her comrades, which was sort of a runnign theme of how useless and pointless the antifa group were in general. Like the fact that the Leo character just wanted to be a lazy bum and get high rather than actually change anything.
For me it was a shame they felt the need to include the Christmas adventurers bit because I could just about get over some of the other stuff. It’s a fantasy of what antifa thinks rich conservatives are, it didn’t really show how anything they were doing was holding back minorities either, which you would of thought would be that groups main priority. It’s telling that the writers couldnt think of anything!
I can see why it got an Oscar nomination for best picture and many others. It’s super solid. My only gripe is that the beginning is super confusing in its tone and purpose, but it picks up speed. It’s tense the whole way through, there’s great direction and camerawork, and there’s some really neat twists along the way. Every character is really morally ambiguous, which is great for a dystopian setting, where the viewer has to suspend their disbelief and see their world in whatever they’re watching. Also, the OST done by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame is really well-done, with a 30-40 minute section of the film containing one long jazz suite that gets more frantic as it goes on.
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