‘One Battle After Another’ Is the Most Overrated Film of the Year

In one brief moment in One Battle After Another, Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) is seen settling down with a joint and watching Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 docudrama The Battle of Algiers on television. The moment carries a bittersweet poignancy in context, with Ferguson — the revolutionary previously known as “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun — reduced to getting his radical kicks on a screen at home. But it’s also a bold move to invoke a cinematic classic so offhandedly, thereby inviting viewers to make comparisons to the present film. And Paul Thomas Anderson’s flick comes nowhere close to measuring up to Pontecorvo’s still-shining example of genuinely intelligent radical cinema.

That, of course, flies in the face of the near-unanimous hosannahs that have greeted the film ever since its release in late September, recently placing high on many best-of-2025 lists and earning eight Golden Globe nominations. Usually, with such mismatches of personal taste and consensus, I’m content to let them pass by without public comment. But when some of those voices go so far as to call Anderson’s film the best of the 21st century to date, a bit of cold water ought to be thrown.

But then, I often feel that way about Anderson’s films. Maybe it’s telling that, for me, his best works are generally his most small-scale, like the charmingly eccentric romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love, and Phantom Thread, a dark romance that can also be seen as a deadpan comedy of remarriage. When he aims higher, though, his reach usually exceeds his grasp. His early epics Boogie Nights and Magnolia nearly drowned in their flashy cinematic influences. And though he calmed down considerably by the time he made There Will Be Blood, that film’s stark aesthetic qualities weren’t enough to cover for skin-deep characterizations that thinned out its attempted foundation-of-America mythmaking.

Such superficiality also plagues One Battle After Another. Anderson evokes many timely hot-button issues in his screenplay — loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. Its opening action sequence touches on anxieties about the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, since it’s set in a detention center along the U.S.–Mexico border that Pat, his partner Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), and the rest of the French 75 revolutionary group infiltrate. Later, Bob’s fumbling attempts to evade the clutches of Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) take place in a sanctuary city, Baktan Cross, where war has broken out between residents and the military. And then there’s the Christmas Adventurers Club, an underground group of wealthy white supremacists that Lockjaw wants to join.

Illegal immigration, police violence, racism — all prominent issues in our current sociopolitical moment. But Anderson is content to toss out signifiers instead of actually exploring the roots of our cultural unrest. Compare that to the nuanced political engagement of The Battle of Algiers, where Pontecorvo’s sympathies for Algerian rebels didn’t preclude a fair-minded portrayal of the French. By contrast, Anderson is merely preaching to the left-leaning choir.

One could argue that Anderson’s interest lies less in political sloganeering than in character study. But the characters in One Battle After Another are as shallow as its politics. This is especially true of Perfidia Beverly Hills, the character given the shortest shrift in the screenplay. Sex is as much a motivating force for her as revolutionary fervor. She’s visibly turned on not only by Pat’s explosives expertise, but by humiliating Lockjaw — forcing him at gunpoint to achieve an erection and walk outside with it at the immigrant detention center. That act of emasculation comes back to haunt her when Lockjaw, aroused by dominant Black women generally, later coerces her into a sexual relationship. When Perfidia is caught in a bank robbery gone wrong, Lockjaw uses their secret encounters to pressure her into betraying the French 75, forcing her to abandon both Pat and their daughter Charlene (Chase Infiniti) as she enters witness protection.

Perfidia’s arc might have been more gut-wrenching had Anderson shown interest in examining her inner conflicts — her ambivalence about motherhood, or whether she’s also attracted to Lockjaw. Instead, she comes off as an oversexed Black woman undone by her attraction to powerful white men.

There’s a lesser but equally troubling instance of the unpleasant tokenism that results from such superficial characterization. After French 75 member Deandra (Regina Hall) pulls Charlene — now Willa Ferguson — from a high school dance to evade Lockjaw, it’s glaring that the one non-binary member of Willa’s friend group is the one who sells her out. The optics are unsettling, especially since Bob’s pot-addled heroism and Lockjaw’s cartoonish villainy receive far more attention. It’s not that Anderson is a racist — he’s married to a Black Jewish woman, Maya Rudolph, with whom he has four children — but when actors are inhabiting such thinly drawn pigeonholes, making vulnerable minority characters visibly weak or evil can be deeply damaging.

One Battle After Another is by no means a bad film. Anderson, always a generous director of actors, elicits committed performances from his stacked ensemble. A climactic three-way car chase — with steep California hills playing a crucial role — is among the most visually and narratively inventive of its kind. And Jonny Greenwood delivers yet another brilliant score, an oft-dissonant motor driving the action forward. The contrast between Bob’s antics and Greenwood’s serious music is the film’s most distinctly Andersonian touch, recalling the inner prankster behind moments like the blackly comic ending of There Will Be Blood.

One previous Anderson title I haven’t mentioned is The Master, the film in which he most successfully fuses ambition with humanity. Its fictionalized account of Scientology’s origins serves mainly as a backdrop for the surrogate father–son relationship between World War II veteran Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The genuine empathy at the film’s core makes its oddest gesture — Dodd serenading his discarded disciple with “On a Slow Boat to China” — unexpectedly moving. By contrast, the Anderson of One Battle After Another seems more invested in motion than in interiority. While the film may prove his most decorated awards contender, history may render a cooler verdict on a work that ultimately feels like a well-made, if overlong, action thriller with self-congratulatory airs of revolutionary pretension.