By Jack Shanley

Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest sprawling epic, One Battle After Another, is less a film and more a sensory assault. An adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, this action-thriller, masquerading as a deeply melancholic character study, sees the director operating at his most anarchic and kinetic. The film follows Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a paranoid former revolutionary living off-grid with his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), until his past—embodied by the grotesque and obsessive Col. Steven Lockjaw (a career-best Sean Penn)—forces them into a dizzying, nationwide chase.

Anderson’s technical prowess is immediately evident, shooting in the ultra-high-resolution VistaVision, which paradoxically lends a beautiful, painterly quality to scenes of utter desperation and chaos. The film rarely lets up, fueled by Jonny Greenwood’s jangling, nerve-shredding score, which acts like a constant, anxiety-inducing heartbeat. DiCaprio channels a man whose revolutionary fire has curdled into exhaustion, creating a portrayal of paranoia that is at once hilarious and heartbreaking. Penn, meanwhile, is a strange monster, a physical caricature of immense power obsessed with eradicating not just the rebels, but the very idea of dissent. The overall story of the film is interesting, along with some great cinematography and simple but brilliant costume design, but it’s the performances that make the film as great as it is.

The reason this film stuck with me, weeks after viewing it in a stunning IMAX screening, wasn’t just the spectacular car chases or the political fury; it was the quiet emotional devastation at its core. I felt somewhat unsettled by the film’s central question: when you sacrifice everything for a cause, what do you owe the generation you bring into that unstable world? Willa, played with striking clarity by Chase Infiniti, is the conscience of the movie. Seeing her forced to navigate her father’s crumbling idealism felt like a true gut-punch.

‘One Battle After Another’ is a top-class piece of filmmaking, with PTA showing us once again how much of an incredible filmmaker he truly is. Overall, it’s a messy, essential masterpiece, and for me potentially the best film of the year.

I’d recommend checking out ‘One Battle After Another’ and see what you think of it; I shall give it a score of Five stars, after my first watch. You can watch it at your local cinema today: Director: Paul Thomas Anderson – Rating: 15A – Genre: Comedy/Drama – Run Time: 2h 50m Language: English. For more film content please follow @movies4fanatics on Instagram.