One Battle After Another review: Leo shines in PTA's comic thriller
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Paul Thomas Anderson leads Leonardo DiCaprio to one of his best performances in One Battle After Another
PTA's '70s-style thriller is funny, exciting, a little strange, and ultimately moving.
By Jesse Hassenger |
September 17, 2025 | 12:00pm
Photo: Warner Bros.
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Copy Link For most of the last twenty-five years, Paul Thomas Anderson has been stuck in the past. Well, maybe not stuck; there’s no quagmire in making some of the best movies of our still-young (if rapidly approaching a quarter-life crisis) century, which don’t need to be explicitly contemporary to feel connected to the current moment. But it’s striking to consider that until One Battle After Another, only one of those movies was actually set in this century, and it was released at a time now distant enough to have been depicted in a period piece. Indeed, the opening scenes of One Battle After Another, set roughly 16 years before the majority of the film, are still later on the timeline than anything else Anderson has made so far, unfolding sometime around or just after the 2008 presidential election.
Published: September 17, 2025 5:00 pm
Source: AV Club — Read original