One Battle After Another (2025)

Some films arrive trailing a particular kind of noise around them, and One Battle After Another (2025) is very much one of those. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and released through Warner Bros. Pictures in association with Ghoulardi Film Company and Domain Entertainment, it is a crime thriller with darkly comic edges, centred on Bob, a burnt-out former radical living well off the grid in a state of paranoid semi-retirement with his resourceful teenage daughter, Willa. When a long-vanished nemesis reappears after sixteen years and Willa goes missing, Bob is forced back into the kind of conflict he has spent the better part of two decades trying to leave behind. Father and daughter, it turns out, are both paying the price for choices he made long before she was old enough to understand them. The tagline, "Some search for battle, others are born into it," gives you a fair sense of the film's moral weather.

Anderson has spent his career making films that resist easy categorisation, and this one sits somewhere between the brooding character studies and the genre exercises in his back catalogue. Shot on film rather than digitally, the production has a tactile, grainy quality that invites comparisons to American cinema of the 1970s, a period Anderson has never been shy about drawing on. At 162 minutes, it is a substantial commitment, and the question of whether that runtime is earned has been very much at the centre of the conversation since the film opened. The ensemble behind Bob and his world includes Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, and Regina Hall, alongside Chase Infiniti as Willa. DiCaprio, no stranger to morally complicated protagonists (his work in Blood Diamond and Gangs of New York are useful points of reference here), brings a particular kind of fraying intensity to roles where a man's past is slowly catching up with him, and this part fits that mode well. Penn, meanwhile, has spent decades building a screen presence that can do a great deal with very little movement.

Whether One Battle After Another lives up to the considerable weight of expectation placed on it before a single ticket was sold is, of course, the real question. The film landed with a wave of near-ecstatic responses from certain quarters, and that groundswell of enthusiasm has coloured almost every subsequent conversation about it. As with any film that arrives pre-loaded with that kind of reputation, your own experience in the seat will depend rather a lot on what you walked in expecting.

Very good, not the 5* masterpiece I've seen so many give it. One Battle After Another is a slick, technically impressive crime thriller that looks and feels like a throwback to 70s character-driven cinema, shot on actual film, no less, with grainy textures, natural lighting, and long takes that showcase both the landscape and the weight on its characters’ faces. Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn are, as expected, phenomenal. DiCaprio brings his signature intensity to a morally ambiguous character caught between loyalty and survival, while Penn struts into his role with quiet menace and lived-in gravitas. The cinematography is stunning, every frame feels deliberate, raw, and grounded, and there are moments where the soundtrack elevates the mood beautifully, blending ambient tension. But other times, the music clashes, feeling intrusive rather than immersive. And while the film builds a strong atmosphere, it never quite delivers on the relentless, pulse-pounding pace it promised. I saw so many comments about a car chase... I booked cinema tickets on the promise of a great car chase. I'm a car chase guy.... It was very underwhelming. Stretching across a flat desert highway with zero turns, surprises, or stakes, it’s more monotonous than thrilling. What should’ve been a standout sequence feels like a missed opportunity. It’s not a bad movie by any means, just one buried under sky-high expectations. It’s moody, well-acted, and visually arresting, but lacks the narrative urgency or set-piece brilliance that would make it unforgettable. Good, not great. A solid crime drama let down by overhype and a few baffling creative choices. Not the masterpiece we were sold.

I think that tension between craft and delivery is what stayed with me most after the credits rolled. There is clearly a very good film somewhere inside One Battle After Another, and on a purely technical level it is hard to argue with what Anderson and his team have put together. But good filmmaking and a satisfying experience are not always the same thing, and when a specific sequence has been talked up as something worth buying a ticket for, falling short of that feels more conspicuous than it might otherwise. For a thriller with comedy edges, it takes itself rather seriously in the places where a little looseness might have served it better. Worth seeing, certainly, but perhaps worth seeing with the volume turned down on whatever you have read about it beforehand. Go in cold if you still can.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2025  | Watched: 2025-09-27

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for One Battle After Another (2025) on YouTube

Where to watch

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