One Battle After Another is easily the most dazzling film of 2025—a tour de force pairing director Paul Thomas Anderson, at the height of his powers, with extraordinary source material:  Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. At nearly three hours, the film never drags. Its propulsive soundtrack, stellar performances, and breathtaking southwestern locations (El Paso, Eureka, CA, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park), all shot on 65mm, keep audiences riveted.

The story centers on a group of revolutionaries known as the French 75, active fifteen years earlier. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Bob Ferguson—also called Pat, Ghetto Cat, and Rocket Man—whose bomb-making skills are legendary.

“Give us a show, Pat,” his comrades urge whenever pyrotechnics are needed to distract from their true mission: freeing imprisoned immigrant women and children.

Bob’s partner in war and love, Perfidia Beverly Hills (a magnetic Teyana Taylor), embodies the fierce power of the Black female revolutionary. “Guns are fun,” she proclaims. “The pussy is for war.” Violence, for her, is an aphrodisiac —especially in her volatile relationship with her nemesis, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, playing chillingly against type). Their cat-and-mouse dynamic blurs the lines between passion and violation. After a botched bank robbery,  Perfidia vanishes into and out of witness protection, and the film jumps ahead sixteen years.

In the present-day storyline,  Perfidia’s daughter Willa (newcomer Chase Infiniti) lives with her dad  Bob—now paranoid, perpetually high, and hiding in a Humboldt-like sanctuary city for the disappeared. He warns her that Lockjaw killed her mother, passing on his survivalist code words and resistance playbook. (“Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction” double as a secret password—a sly nod to Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” revealed in the end credits.)

Once Lockjaw resurfaces, father and daughter go on the run, separately. Their escape reactivates sleeper cells, including a fearsome group of marijuana-farming-nuns, who rally to safeguard one of their own. With the help of their martial arts mentor (a standout Benicio Del Toro), Anderson draws a resonant throughline between past and present struggles for justice. The battles, the film insists, are eternal—the players change, but the song stays the same.

Billed as a comedy/drama, One Battle After Another delivers biting satire. Anderson skewers everyone—the revolutionaries and fascists alike. The Christmas Adventurers Club, a secret society of elite white men, vows to rid the world of “lunatics, punk trash, and haters.” Their obsession with purity evokes hate groups both past and present.

“Want to save the planet? Start with immigration,” Lockjaw sneers.

The humor cuts deep: DiCaprio’s aging hippy in a plaid bathrobe desperately trying to keep up with his skateboarding posse is as absurd as the tea-sipping supremacists toasting with heirloom Spode china. And you’ll never hear Ella Fitzgerald’s “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” the same way again.
Yet beneath the explosions and comedy lies genuine philosophy: “Time doesn’t exist, yet it still controls us,” muses one character. In One Battle After Another, time does seem to dissolve—for two hours and fifty minutes, at least. The impression, however, may last a lifetime.