One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025, USA)
One Battle After Another is the latest from director Paul Thomas Anderson. One of the handful of Hollywood directors who is able to operate with a great deal of autonomy and attract top talent, Anderson’s career has shown a significant amount of depth and versatility over the years - dabbling in everything from period pieces to sprawling comedies, to his last film - the California-set autobiographical coming-of-age story Licorice Pizza . With his biggest budget yet (far north of $100M), One Battle is what could perhaps be described as Anderson’s first action film (though that is a stretch). As with Inherent Vice , Battle finds Anderson drawing once again from literary legend Thomas Pynchon, this time 1990’s Vineland . Pynchon has an oddball universe - it is at once part of the American landscape, but operates within its own quirky space. Battle operates in a world that looks and feels very similar to our own, and the political parallels are very difficult to ignore (despite the fact...
