David Farnor | On 22, Feb 2026

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor
Certificate: 15

What on earth do you do next if you’re Paul Thomas Anderson? You’ve tackled period, politically charged epic in There Will Be Blood, charming anti-rom-com in Licorice Pizza and Punch-Drunk Love, harrowing Scientology-tinged thriller in The Master, darkly amusing psychodrama in Phantom Thread and noir-tinged comedy in Boogie Nights. He’s never been the kind of director to make a film for him and film for the studios – you get the sense that every film is for him, a uniquely personal oddity and odyssey. His latest, One Battle After Another, is the closest he’s come to breaking that tradition – and that’s perhaps precisely the point.

After adapting Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Voice in 2014, Anderson returns to another of Pynchon’s novels – 1990’s Vineland – to weave a tale of revolution, identity and determination. Sometimes, you feel like he’s still weaving as the film unfolds. We begin in the heyday of the French 75, an activist group who are in their element while robbing a bank. Amid the chaos is explosives man Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who finds himself in a heated relationship with group leader Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). But, unbeknownst to him, she also has a warped fling with the villainous Colonel Steven J Lockjaw (Sean Penn) when she flees rebellion life and turns army informant.

Fast forward 16 years and Bob and Perfidia’s daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), is now a teenager, and Bob is a nobody. Washed up, burnt out and rarely out of his dressing down, he lives in a stoner haze of memories, regrets and bitter rewatches of Battle of Algiers. He raises Willa defiantly off-grid, even though he’s so out of touch he has no idea what the grid looks like. So when Colonel Lockjaw rears his head with a mission to wipe out the remnants of the French 75 – and any potential trace of his fling with Perfidia, so that he can join a white supremacist network without scandal – Bob’s time has finally come. He just doesn’t know it.

What ensues is a ramshackle ride through deflated hope and resurrected passion, which effectively takes the form of one never-ending cat-and-mouse sequence. Either Bob and Willa are on the run from the detestable Colonel Lockjaw – or Bob is on the hunt for Colonel Lockjaw to rescue and protect his daughter. Along the way, there are car chases, shootouts and explosions, all of which Bob is woefully unprepared for.

Leonardo DiCaprio is exceptional at inhabiting Bob’s loser energy, playing wonderfully against type as the dishevelled and jaded loner. A standout scene where he can’t remember a password over the phone is laugh-out-loud funny, and DiCaprio balances that energy with a disarming emotional sincerity and fierce loyalty. He’s countered brilliantly by Sean Penn, who’s grotesque as the equally determined Lockjaw – a perfect fit for the daftly named white supremacist group The Christmas Adventurers. If he elevates the satirical swipes at the modern world to cartoonish heights, the star of the show is undoubtedly Chase Infiniti, who grounds them with an endearing ferocity and passion.

The result is an entertaining, surprisingly timely romp that asks pertinent questions about the kind of society we leave for the generation after us, and the kind of battles that we need to fight because of the generations before us – not to mention how we handle being on the losing side of trying to change things for the better. It’s wrapped up in a typically freewheeling tone that keeps things unpredictable and ramshackle – but at 2 hours and 42 minutes, it’s occasionally too ramshackle, struggling to contain its ideas with the same focused intensity as Anderson’s best work. Paradoxically, though, that’s exactly what stops an apparent crowdpleaser becoming too plain and conventional – if this is him toying with blockbuster territory, it’s still a pleasure to see him most of all having fun.

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