One Battle After Another

UK Release Date. 26 September 2025
Certification. 15
Running Time. 2 hours 41 min
Director. Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast. Benicio Del Toro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Regina Hall, John Hoogenakker, Chase Infiniti, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor.
Rating. 65%

Review.

Paul Thomas Anderson is perhaps one of the most divisive filmmakers of his generation. From an impressive beginning - Hard Eight and Boogie Nights - he has continued to produce an array of intriguing films that have divided audiences for almost 30 years. More impressive still is how the director has remained at the top of his game for the same period of time - Anderson is the only filmmaker to have won the equivalent prize for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival (for Punch-Drunk Love in 2002), the Berlin International Film Festival (for There Will Be Blood in 2008) and the Venice Film Festival (for The Master in 2012). All without directing a single franchise.

Anderson's latest offering - one of the front-runners for the Best Picture award at the 98th Academy Awards, presented by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences - One Battle After Another is no less polarising. 

Set in a barely reinvented America, One Battle After Another, explodes, with minimal exposition, into a story truly worthy of its own film: the French 75 - a group of dedicated revolutionaries intent on challenging the widespread abuse of power. Spearheaded by the spirited Perfidia Beverley Hills (Teyana Taylor) and the group’s demolitions expert, Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), the French 75 embark on a mission to liberate immigrants from an immigration centre.

When the French 75 are forced underground and into hiding, Pat escapes with the couple's baby, and the two adopt the identities of Bob and Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti). Cut to 16 years later, and an oh-so-clever needle drop - Dirty Work by Steely Dan - and we’re ready to embark on the meat of One Battle After Another. 

After nominations for performances in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, The Aviator, Blood Diamond and The Wolf Of Wall Street, Leonardo DiCaprio received an Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in Alejandro G. Iñárritu's The Revenant. In One Battle After Another, DiCaprio delivers another impressive performance, and perhaps one of his most comedic as the former radical, turned slipshod, burnt-out, bathrobe-bedecked stumblebum hiding off-grid. The bathrobe immediately elicits comparisons with The Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski, but Bob Ferguson is no Dude. He's too uptight. Too highly strung. Too paranoid. He'd benefit from a beverage - The Dude would recommend a White Russian.

The film is an anomaly, and one that is difficult to pigeonhole; a darkly comedic crime thriller, with elements of action and romance, and noir. For a film marketed as an action epic, there's a scarcity of action. But Anderson - a master of the set-piece - adroitly handles the final chase sequence, cranking up the tension with a slow-burning car chase over a series of hypnotic blind summits.

On the surface, the film appears to deal with an out-of-control American military machine hell-bent on ridding the world of any resistance to its authority. But One Battle After Another unmistakably remains a Paul Thomas Anderson film, with a focus on the families we are born into and the ones we build.