'One Battle After Another' may be the best film of the year

Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor fuel a wild ride of revolution and Maga-era paranoia in 'One Battle After Another'

It’s no surprise that Paul Thomas Anderson is the only filmmaker who’s managed to successfully bring the paranoid, absurdist, dense puzzles of reclusive American literary icon Thomas Pynchon to screen. Anderson’s 2014 adaptation of Pynchon’s rollicking ‘70s-set satirical novel Inherent Vice pulled off an entertaining and engaging comic noir from what seemed the impossible-to-adapt source material.

Throughout his career, Anderson — arguably the most imaginative filmmaker of his generation — has created work infused with an eerie, surreal cynicism of American values and a gritty aesthetic that demonstrates, as the director once quipped in an interview, how he learnt to make films by watching his father’s VHS collection of pornographic films, growing up in the sun-drenched uncertainty of post-Watergate 1970s Los Angeles.

For years, Anderson has insisted that he was hoping to return to Pynchon for an adaptation of the writer’s 1990 novel Vineland — a book that divided critics with its tale of the death of the revolutionary, society-altering idealism of 1960s America reflected through the challenges faced by former members of a Weathermen Underground-style revolutionary organisation decades later during the “greed is good,” “hippies are all yuppies now,” era of the 1980s Reagan administration.

Anderson’s new film One Battle After Another is not quite the Pynchon Vineland adaptation he'd originally promised to make but rather an almost-three-hour, rocket propellant-fuelled dark comedy inspired by Pynchon’s book but influenced by the current divisive, anxiety riddled, paranoia-drenched moment of the second coming of Donald Trump and the Maga movement.

Instead of the 1960s, the film opens during an unspecified moment in the recent past where we meet a ragtag group of angry, righteous activists dubbed the French 75, led by the zealously dedicated Perfidia Beverly Hills (the first of many character names that suggest that the only person better than Pynchon at satirical character names is Anderson channelling Pynchon). She's played with superb intensity and raw sexual charge by Teyana Taylor. In an explosive, tense set piece that less confident directors might climax with rather than use at the beginning of a film, Perfidia and her gang liberate the inmates of an immigration detention centre, humiliating its commander, Steven J Lockjaw (a clench-jawed, muscle bulging Sean Penn in his finest onscreen work in decades) and leaving behind an explosive fireball of fury, care of French 75’s blowing-things-up expert and object of Perfidia’s burning-revolution-inspired lust, Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio). From there it’s off to the French ’75 races as Anderson lays out the Bonnie & Clyde story of Perfidia and Pat and their “damn the man” exploits before Perfidia gets pregnant and the couple give birth to a daughter, Willa. Pat soon finds himself playing the roles of father and mother to a child that Perfidia has no intention of letting get in the way of the untelevised revolution. When a mission goes sour and Perfidia is arrested, Pat finds himself on the run with Willa with Perfidia in the wind, never to seen again.

Sixteen years later, Pat is now a pot-smoking sad sack who’s raised Willa (Chase Infiniti) in a still paranoid but as normal as he can manage home environment in a fictional north California backwater. Time may have marched on but the times haven't really changed. And when Lockwood comes searching for the ghosts of his past to try remove any obstacles to his imminent initiation into the ludicrously named but plausible Christmas Adventurers Club — an elite secret organisation of white supremacists who pull the real strings of power in the late capitalist American Empire — Pat is rudely jerked out of his self-pitying slumber and onto a rollercoaster ride that reignites the embers of what remains of the French 75’s networks in a race to save Willa from the clutches of the demon from her father’s past.

We live in an Ice-agent-rampaging, Maga cancel culture, hysterical megaphone age when the paranoid imaginings of government-suspicious Americans are realised daily in actions crazier than they could dream of, and those in power are so brazenly insane as to be beyond any caricatures Pynchon could create. In this moment, Anderson’s film is an eighteen-wheeler, no-brakes, runaway beast that grabs you from its first minute and holds you in its absurdly farcical claw until it spits you out 161 minutes later — entertained, engaged and laughing at its brilliantly realised characters and twists, and cringingly uncomfortably at the short gap that exists between its implausible, anarchic, Terry Southern style satire and the reality aired constantly on news channels and social media.

With stellar supporting work from Benicio Del Toro and Regina Hall, boldly gripping cinematography by long-time Anderson collaborator Michael Bauman, typically ingenious needle-drops and the most aptly minimalist and distinctive scoring work yet created for the director by his regular sonic guru Jonny Greenwood, One Battle After Another is the first great political film of its age, which also manages to be an ageless masterwork of action comedy and satirical freewheeling anarchy.

It may be too soon to deem it the best film of 2025 but it’s certainly a front-runner and it’s also perhaps Anderson’s most entertaining and fully-satisfying work in recent years — a film that, when the dust has either settled or rained down so thick as to suffocate us all in this moment, will stand as a master artwork of not just the 21st century but cinema history too.