![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/image-2025-09-29T075655.788.webp?resize=819%2C1024&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nWriter\/director Paul Thomas Anderson is known as a top-tier talent without top-tier recognition. None of his movies have made more than $50 million at the domestic box office, and despite 11 nominations, he\u2019s never won himself an Academy Award (a combined three Oscar wins have come from his films, including Daniel Day-Lewis as Best Actor for 2007\u2019s \u201cThere Will Be Blood,\u201d but I\u2019m talking about Anderson personally). \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d seems to represent an attempt by Anderson to step up his game, both commercially and creatively. The result is a film that is highly likely to give him his first blockbuster, and yes, could very well end his losing streak at the Oscars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The film initially follows Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), members of a revolutionary group known as the French 75. The group frees detainees, robs banks, blows up (hopefully) abandoned buildings, and generally causes headaches for authority figures like Lt. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Pat and Perfidia fall in love due to their shared thrills in their missions, but Perfidia also has an affair with Lockjaw due to their shared thrills in their cat-and-mouse game. Perfidia eventually gives birth to a daughter named Charlene, and Pat wants the three of them to settle down and have a normal life, but his wanting to give up the risk drives Perfidia away. She ultimately botches things so badly that the group is brought down by Lockjaw, Pat and Charlene have to go into hiding, and she\u2019s basically dead to everyone who may have once cared about her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sixteen years later, the now-Col. Lockjaw is up for membership in a powerful white-supremacist organization. The problem is that they won\u2019t let him join if they join if they find out about his mixed-race possible daughter Charlene. Lockjaw sets to tracking down the girl now known as \u201cWilla Ferguson\u201d (Chase Infinati), who is living in a sanctuary city with her father-figure \u201cBob.\u201d Bob is expectedly loving and protective of Willa, but he\u2019s a mess himself, which causes the girl to practically have to be a parent to him. She\u2019s smart and steadfast like her mother, but she has no idea the trouble she\u2019s about to be in with Lockjaw and associates both legitimate and unscrupulous descending on the area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So much of the film is chase and action sequences, with the French 75\u2019s activities in the first half of the film giving way to both Lockjaw pursuing Willa and an intoxicated Bob trying to recover Willa with the help of her karate instructor (Benicio Del Toro) in the second. Anderson has been known more for \u201ctension\u201d than \u201caction\u201d in his career, but this movie \u2013 especially with its bumpy-ride car chases \u2013 will make you think he\u2019s been an action director this whole time. But the appeal doesn\u2019t lie entirely in action, there are also some great emotional performances and gut-busting dry humor, as well as more outrageous humor. Bob\u2019s frustration over being expected to remember decades-old French 75 code is arguably the highlight of the entire movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At this point, the question isn\u2019t whether or not \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d will be nominated for Academy Awards, it\u2019s the number of categories in which it will be nominated. DiCaprio, Penn, and surefire breakouts Taylor and Infiniti could all get into the acting categories, and Anderson himself wears so many hats in the production that he could be up for at least four awards. I do have a few quibbles, like how the film does so little with a fellow revolutionary played by Regina Hall, and Bob\u2019s questionable usefulness to the story, and how a character seemingly only survives a consequential action sequence just so they can be used for a humorous scene later. But overall this is a very exciting, funny, enjoyable movie that I wouldn\u2019t mind earning Paul Thomas Anderson the recognition he\u2019s deserved for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grade: B<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d is rated R for pervasive language, violence, sexual content and drug use. Its running time is 161 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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