The stakes are high for Paul Thomas Anderson’s big-budget new counter-cultural caper One Battle After Enough, but so are the expectations.
And so, we’re happy to report, is the Rotten Tomatoes score.
The critics’ reviews are in, and the early word is universally positive. It’s five stars almost across the board.
The director’s tenth film in a career without a single dud, it’s loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland and boasts Leonardo DiCaprio as an addled revolutionary trying to keep himself together and his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti) close as the US military and a shady cabal close in.
Sean Penn is doing things few actors have done before – in the best way – while Benicio del Toro and Teyana Taylor light up the movie as members of an insurgency movement with powerful contemporary resonance.
What are the reviews for One Battle After Another?
‘A mighty 162 minutes of danger, comedy, excitement, love, sex and confusion,’ raves Time Out’s review, which calls it ‘a formidable piece of work’.
‘DiCaprio… astounds – frazzled and absurd yet also sweet and even noble, he evokes Jack Nicholson in his prime,’ writes The Telegraph.
The BBC praises the film’s political acuity and topicality. ‘American society… has been a major theme for both Pynchon and Anderson,’ it notes, ‘and it grounds Anderson's dazzler of a film, giving it an emphatic, unmistakable political charge’.
‘One Battle After Another is at once serious and unserious, exciting and baffling,’ says The Guardian, ‘a tonal fusion sending that crazy fizz across the VistaVision screen – an acquired taste, yes, but addictive’.
The Hollywood Reporter has praise for the director’s willingness to grapple with the fatiguing relentlessness of culture war skirmishing. ‘[It] is the rare American film released in these benighted times of ours – with the backing of a major studio, no less – to be clear and insistent in the target of its anger, its despair and its prescriptions for what might make things better,’ it writes.
One Battle After Another might be the best movie released by a major American studio since I started working as a critic (~2010). distressing how little else comes to mind!
— david ehrlich (@davidehrlich) September 9, 2025
When can you see One Battle After Another?
It’s in cinemas worldwide on Friday, September 26. Watch the trailer below and read our verdict in full here.
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Which Paul Thomas Anderson film makes our list of the 100 greatest movies ever made?