One Battle After Another made me remember why I love movies
There’s a specific kind of film that doesn’t just entertain you—it recalibrates you. It makes the world feel sharper when you walk back outside. It makes you want to call someone and say, “Go see this. No, seriously—go.”
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is that kind of film for me. It’s my favorite film of the year, not because it’s “important” (though it is), and not because it’s “timely” (though it absolutely is), but because it’s alive—thrumming, funny, furious, tender, and made with the kind of craft that feels borderline extinct in big American filmmaking.
The premise moves like an urgent whisper that turns into a sprint: a former revolutionary, Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), is pulled back into a conflict he never really escaped when his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), is put in danger—dragging old alliances, old enemies, and the bruised mythology of resistance right back to the surface.
Anderson builds the world around a left-wing militant group (French 75), a sadistic obsessive antagonist in Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), and a constellation of allies who feel like they’ve lived whole lives off-screen—Deandra (Regina Hall) and Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) among the most memorable.
But the movie’s real engine isn’t plot. It’s connection. The father-daughter bond at the center isn’t sentimental wallpaper—it’s the pulse that keeps the whole machine human.
The first thing I loved: the momentum. This movie starts like the climax of another movie. It opens in motion—border tension, hostage energy, liberation as chaos—and then it just… refuses to relax. That’s not just pacing. That’s a statement: the film’s saying there’s no clean “before” and “after” in a country built on conflict. There’s only what we inherit, what we ignore, and what comes back to collect.
The second thing I loved: it’s political, but it’s not a lecture. A lot of movies want credit for having “something to say,” and then they say it like they’re reading it off a whiteboard. One Battle After Another is smarter than that. It doesn’t posture. It dramatizes. It lets ideology show up as texture, consequence, contradiction—people trying to be brave and failing, people trying to be good and bargaining anyway, people improvising ethics in a world that doesn’t reward purity.
It’s also not afraid of mythmaking—the kind that makes some audiences nervous. The film has the audacity to imagine resistance as something more than a doomed aesthetic, and to treat tenderness as a political force, not a weakness.
DiCaprio’s performance is the best kind of controlled chaos: funny, frantic, intimate, and grounded in the desperate love of a father who keeps realizing the world is bigger than his ability to protect his kid.
Penn, meanwhile, gives the kind of villain performance that doesn’t just “work”—it *infects the air*. He’s grotesque, yes, but also frighteningly plausible: a man who confuses domination for destiny.
And Chase Infiniti? The movie has a heart because she’s in it. Even when she’s not on-screen, the film behaves like she is—like the story is orbiting her gravity.
Two things kept blowing me away: the sound and the sense of speed. There’s a major car chase that feels less like “a sequence” and more like a sustained act of cinematic breath control—edited and designed with peaks and valleys, using sound as a storytelling weapon.
Visually, the film doesn’t chase polish. It goes for rawness—camera shake, close-to-the-road intensity, light that’s allowed to be harsh and imperfect—like Anderson wanted the filmmaking to *sweat* in the same way the characters do. And Jonny Greenwood’s score is its own living organism—sometimes barely there, sometimes like an alarm you can’t locate, sometimes like the movie’s conscience tapping you on the shoulder when you’d rather look away.
But why it’s my favorite film of the year? Because it does the rare thing: it’s propulsive and profound at the same time. It’s a thriller that remembers people have inner lives. It’s a political story that refuses to flatten anyone into a symbol. It’s violent, but not empty. It’s funny, but not dismissive. And when it gets tender, it earns it. It also feels like a film made with conviction—one that critics and audiences alike have treated as a major work, from year-end honors to serious awards recognition.
Mostly, though, I love it because it made me feel something I miss in modern culture: not just outrage, not just irony, not just resignation—but a complicated, stubborn kind of aliveness. The feeling that even in a country addicted to conflict, the point isn’t to win purity points. The point is to stay human anyway.