One Battle After Another

Review: We interrupt your regularly scheduled Paul Thomas Anderson chronological review to bring you a different Paul Thomas Anderson review, for his new 2025 release. This film has gotten a ton of praise, and there’s probably few things I can articulate that haven’t already been said or written. I feel as though I was going into this film blind because I didn’t really have a great grasp of the plot. This was kind of nice though because everything was a surprise. As soon as I got out of the theater I pulled out my notes app and started typing and here are some of the tidbits I put down.

• I never realized how blue Leonardo DiCaprio’s eyes are. Lol.

• This is a way better title than ‘The Battle of Baktan Cross’

• Teyana Taylor runs very fast

• Love Leo as a dad

• Mo Bamba?

• Well scored

Some other things I’m going to include is that the film does surprisingly still have PTA’s typical brand of humor with some incredibly funny tongue in cheek moments. I say tongue in cheek because most of them are delivered by antagonistic characters saying awful things, but they did a great job framing it so that it’s obvious that this person is in the wrong.

There were some great performances in this movie. I want to actually start by shouting out Chase Infiniti. I feel like her character was almost written as more of a plot device than a character, but she did a lot with that. Then I’ll move onto Leonardo DiCaprio. He was good. Need I say more? It’s Leo. Benicio del Toro was another stand out for me, with his character feeling like the moral compass/heart of the film, at least for me. I really enjoyed his performance and thought he was a great straight man to Leo’s more loose character. Teyana Taylor admittedly didn’t have as much screentime as I initially anticipated but she really left a mark on it, with her character feeling like a looming presence off screen through the entire film. I want to mention Tony Goldwyn, who played a smaller role but was very impactful in his time. Finally, Sean Penn, who I think is gonna earn an Oscar nomination for his performance. Really solid & he played the part really well. One of the best villains of the year.

High: Seeing this on IMAX was really cool & I’d recommend it if you can. Although I didn’t see it in Vista Vision, I do think there’s a very noticeable difference in the film. There were some really nice visuals, especially once we got to some of the climactic scenes happening on a long open road.

Low: I mean I don’t really have a low, but one thing that I did notice that would’ve been helpful is subtitles when characters are speaking Spanish. I can follow like the tiniest amount of Spanish, but for us uncultured folks it would be quite helpful. However, I really understand the choice (if intentional) to not include them because this film is very much a visual experience and they definitely would’ve affected that.

Rating: 8/10