One Battle After Another is what happens when a director at the top of his game hires some of the best actors in the world to tell a contemporary story that is both relevant as hell and ultimately timeless. Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) has created something with One Battle After Another that uses everything he has learned in his career from Boogie Nights through Magnolia, There Will be Blood and Inherent Vice.
One Battle After Another is the culmination of PTA’s career and a high-water mark in an already impressive oeuvre. Part political commentary, part stoner comedy, part family drama and part neo-noir, One Battle After Another is a singular film that could have only come from one our generation’s greatest directors.
Similarly, the cast PTA has assembled wholesale knocks it out of the park with both Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn turning in powerhouse performances that give their characters nuance, depth and realism, even within the heightened reality of One Battle After Another.
One Battle After Another Review
One Battle After Another’s first act is set 16 years before the rest of the film. In a fast-paced and kinetic opening, we’re introduced to DiCaprio’s Ghetto Pat/Bob, Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills and their ragtag group of revolutionaries known as the French 75. Right away, One Battle After Another’s parallels with contemporary America are on display, warts and all. The French 75 infiltrate and rescue South American immigrants from a makeshift detention centre while Perfidia encounters Penn’s Captain Stephen Lockjaw. She sexually humiliates him and in that moment he becomes obsessed with her.
The French 75 continue to carry out attacks while Pat and Perfidia eventually have a child together, after Perfidia has a secret one-night stand with Lockjaw. Pat wants to settle down and become a proper family, but Perfidia refuses to lay down arms. After a botched bank robbery, Perfidia is captured and saved from a prison sentence by Lockjaw, who gets her to become an informant and rat out the rest of the French 75. What follows is a mad scramble by the French 75 to run and disappear while Perfidia flees her witness protection and disappears into Mexico.
Sixteen years later, Pat, now Bob, and his daughter, Willa, are living a quiet life in a sanctuary city while Lockjaw has become a Colonel thanks to his hardline anti-immigration actions. His meteoric rise sees him invited into the Christmas Adventurers Club — a secret society of rich white supremacists — who advise that his entry requires a thorough background check. Lockjaw, knowing that Willa may be his child, sets out to hunt her down. To say any more would be to wildly verge into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say, from here, One Battle After Another unfolds in a thrilling and often ridiculous sequence of events, driven by Bob desperate to save his child.
At its core, One Battle After Another is a story about family and the lengths people go to protect theirs. Bob and Willa are at the forefront of this, but we’re also introduced to Benicio Del Toro’s Sergio, who is a community leader amongst the immigrant community in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross. His family includes everyone in his community, and in one scene, where the MKU Police are raiding the city, we see Sergio working to ensure the safe escape of dozens of immigrants. Other examples include touching scenes with Perfidia’s mother, Willa’s friends lying to the police and even the pot growing nuns who take Willa in.
One Battle After Another has a strong emphasis on family, but it makes the point that it’s not just about blood. Family includes the people we choose, and sometimes those bonds are even stronger than the ones made by blood. It even posits that those blood bonds can be the weakest and most detrimental, and that focusing on those bonds above all others is folly.
The trio at the centre of One Battle After Another, Bob, Willa and Lockjaw, show different sides of this familial connection. Bob only wants to save and protect Willa, while Lockjaw only wants to get at her to further his own ambitions and protect his secrets. Bob and Lockjaw are also strange, inverted reflections of one another. They’re both deeply weird and flawed and are riddled with personal insecurities, but where Lockjaw channels his fears into hatred, Bob is all about love.
Amidst the familial drama and the harrowing and all too real commentary on immigration and the United States’ current turmoil, One Battle After Another is genuinely funny. Laugh out loud funny. Much of this comedy is driven by Bob and his drug-addled, stoner schtick. One moment sees him following a group of Sergio’s men across rooftops to escape the police, which ends when he falls from the roof, onto a tree, then into an alley. The framing of the shot and DiCaprio’s performance saw the entire cinema burst into laughter.
Lockjaw is also a constant source of comedy, but with him, the laughs usually come at his expense because of how despicable he is. The Christmas Adventurers Club also generate some laughs thanks to their greeting of “Hail Santa”, a ridiculous version of Hail Satan that makes them seem, for a moment, innocuous instead of evil. Which, make no mistake, they are and prove themselves to be before One Battle After Another is done.
I could go on and on about One Battle After Another and wax poetic about its merits and why it’s PTA’s best film, one of the best movies of 2025 and an incredible achievement, but instead I’ll simply say that it’s a movie that needs to be seen. If you’re a fan of cinema, One Battle After Another is a must-watch. Hell, even if you just go to the movies to be entertained and switch your brain off, One Battle After Another is for you.
It is a true masterpiece and a masterclass in directing, acting and storytelling. It demands to be seen in theatres and you’re experience will be all the better for it should you go out and see it in a cinema surrounded by other people.
Leo Stevenson attended a preview screening of One Battle After Another as a guest of Warner Bros Australia.
