One Battle After Another (2025) Review

I recently saw a video of ICE agents pulling a man away from his sobbing family before slamming his wife onto the ground in front of their screaming children. I’ve seen a man screaming “HELP!” as numerous agents pressed tasers into his back while handcuffing him. These stories only scratch the surface of what’s currently happening in the US, not even accounting for the fact that over a thousand asylum seekers have recently gone missing from the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp. In times like these, one understands how Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest offering had the potential to say something very important about our current political moment. It’s centered around Bob, a retired revolutionary hurrying to reunite with his daughter after his past catches up with him. It’s a story about family and friendship in times of fascist repression; and while that may sound like a balm for our turbulent times, I couldn’t help but leave the theater with a bad taste in my mouth.

Bob’s specialty is bombs. He makes them, primarily, as distractions so other members of the French 75 vigilante group can free migrants from detention centers or rob banks for funding. Despite what the trailer would have you think, a huge part of the script focuses on this part of his life. We see the French 75 hold border guards at gunpoint, sabotage the campaign offices of conservative politicians and target electrical grids. The way Anderson and co. shot this section is interesting to me; it aligns with critiques I often hear about war movies, how filming atrocities in a ‘cinematic’ way is necessarily glorifying, or at least extenuating, those actions. While Cinematographer Michael Bauman does try to dirty the explosions and gunfire with a shaky handheld camera, hard light sources with rich shadows and telephoto tracking shots, focusing so much on these moments of sabotage hints at a retained romanticism. The vast landscapes, gorgeous lighting, and fantastic camerawork used in these high-octane scenes are obviously fun to watch, but should they be? Does this ‘fun’ not ultimately undermine the seriousness of the story’s point about resistance and the immigration crisis caused by America’s burgeoning neo-Nazi movement?

If focusing on the more spectacular parts of revolution didn’t make it clear that Anderson is not interested in really capturing what it means to build a movement, or even to make a political point, his blending of sex and revolution in a Freudian montage surely will. This scene makes one wonders if these people even care about freeing immigrants, or if they’re just in it for the action. I’m all for nuanced, complicated characters, but I think there are perhaps some instances where it only muddies the themes at the core of a text, ultimately making us wonder what the point of the film even is, which is a problem for a movie with a 2hr50min runtime. Spending so much time filming the bombings and shootouts also prevents characters from having enough time to really develop, so even though we can assume Bob’s distance from his daughter, we haven’t seen enough of their interactions to really believe it. Speaking of things that should be central story engines but are instead relegated to the background, I have to talk about how this story handles immigrants.

There is certainly something about how Anderson films migrant families that engenders sympathy, but I disagree with conservatives saying this movie promotes ‘open borders.’ I’d argue the film, much like the system it purports to critique, fails to recognize the humanity of those this country is currently treating as second-class citizens. We see these families on the ground in the detention camps, we see them scurrying in fear from droves of ICE agents carrying military-grade weaponry, but we never hear from them. Despite them being who the French 75 were trying to free at the start of the film, and their omnipresence for the rest of its runtime, at no point in the three-hour journey do we get their perspective or voice despite the myriad of side characters Anderson introduces throughout. One could say that this is beyond the scope of the movie, but if Anderson is going to touch upon such a serious and intense topic, I think he owes it to the community whose stories he’s using to give their perspective a platform. Without this, these people become no different than the mountains in the desert: mere backdrops that just serve as a cool background in front of which the ‘real’ story advances. In a movie that gestures so often toward the political, omissions like this highlight how underdeveloped the political themes of the film are. Despite that, I did find it all very effective.

Maybe this is thanks to the actors, who all did an amazing job. Anderson is known for working with stellar casts, and this is no different. I think Leonardo DiCaprio hit a career best here; in an oeuvre filled with roles portraying overgrown man-children, I think he took on this more mature part with a great sense of commitment and embodiment. Teyana Taylor was also fantastic, providing an absolutely thunderous performance anytime she’s on screen, and it was great to see Regina Hall knock a non-comedic role so far out the park. There’s also Chase Infinity who, along with DiCaprio, forms an emotional core for the film with a performance that is much more mature than one would expect from a first-time film actor.

We live in troubled times. Genocides in the Middle East appear as terrifying harbingers of what’s in store for those of us living through America’s hard pivot to the far right. Masked men are disappearing fathers, mothers, children in broad daylight and the wealth gap only continues to increase. Times of such repression are what creates revolutions, and we all know that every empire falls. I think that’s what I enjoyed most about the ending to this film: it’s a promise that, regardless of what the capitalist state does to silence and marginalize those within its borders, we will always fight back, our children will always fight back, and the fight will continue until we are all free. One Battle After Another hits theaters this weekend. It’s far from a perfect movie, but I do think it has the potential to spark important conversations. See it in any of the formats it’s currently available in!