{"id":2051760,"date":"2025-09-26T13:39:21","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T13:39:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2051760"},"modified":"2025-09-26T13:39:21","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T13:39:21","slug":"euronews-cultures-film-of-the-week-one-battle-after-another","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/euronews-cultures-film-of-the-week-one-battle-after-another\/","title":{"rendered":"Euronews Culture’s Film of the Week: \u2018One Battle After Another\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It\u2019s hardly a piping hot take to say that Paul Thomas Anderson has not made a bad film.<\/p>\n

From his breakout second feature Boogie Nights to his misunderstood romantic comedy Phantom Thread<\/strong><\/a>, via the Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood and the Silver Lion-nabbing The Master, the American filmmaker has consistently proven that he\u2019s in a league of his own. And whether you pick Punch-Drunk Love or Licorice Pizza as your least favourite entry in his filmography, his \u2018weakest\u2019 would still top other directors\u2019 screen credits.<\/p>\n

So, it will come as a shock to no one that his tenth feature, One Battle After Another, continues the\u00a0impressive winning streak.<\/p>\n

What it does do, however, is answer the question: \u201cWhat if we gave one of the most talented filmmakers out there a blockbuster-sized budget and let him shoot the absolute shit out of\u00a0The Big Lebowski-meets-Mission: Impossible?\u201d<\/p>\n

Get ready for a very satisfying answer.<\/p>\n

\"One<\/span><\/div>\n

One Battle After Another <\/span> – Warner Bros. Pictures <\/span><\/p>\n

Loosely inspired by the postmodern countercultural novel \u201cVineland\u201d, One Battle After Another is PTA\u2019s second adaptation of the notoriously reclusive and infamously hard-to-adapt novelist Thomas Pynchon \u2013 following the thrilling Inherent Vice. And there are parallels to be drawn with the ambitous 2014 stoner detective opus; except this one feels tighter.<\/p>\n

The story starts\u00a0on the Mexican border, where radical vigilante group The French 75 launch a raid on a migrant detention centre. Among the group’s members are explosives expert “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun\u00a0(Leonardo DiCaprio) and his impassioned girlfriend Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor).<\/p>\n

The op goes according to plan, but sees Perfidia\u00a0corner the camp\u2019s commander, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). She leaves an impression on him. And his crotch.<\/p>\n

A chain of events, which shan\u2019t be spoiled here, sees Lockjaw arrest Perfidia, who rats out her group. She then disappears, leaving Pat and their young baby daughter behind.<\/p>\n

Fast-forward 16 years, and Pat – now Bob Ferguson –\u00a0is no longer the revolutionary he once was. He\u2019s gone down the Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski route, his mind progressively fried by copious amounts of tweezer-held doobies. The dishevelled single dad\u2019s daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) is doing better \u2013 except she has to deal with her father\u2019s paranoid rants and no phones rule.<\/p>\n

Except it\u2019s not paranoia if they\u2019re really after you, as Bob is vindicated when Lockjaw re-enters their lives. The once emasculated and still mesmerized military man is hellbent on finding Willa, and Bob needs to get his act together in order to protect her. That includes remembering the revolutionary greeting codes.<\/p>\n

\"One<\/span><\/div>\n

One Battle After Another <\/span> – Warner Bros. Pictures <\/span><\/p>\n

For reasons which become all too apparent once you dive into PTA\u2019s modern American epic, that\u2019s all the plot synopsis that should be allowed. Nevermind how martial arts Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), the holy sisters of the Brave Beaver, Comrade Josh who feels his revolutionary space is being violated and a secret society of white supremacists obsessed with \u201cnative sons\u201d and Saint Nick fit into all of this madness… You\u2019ll have to head to the cinema to find out.<\/p>\n

Trust us: it\u2019s the best money you\u2019ll spend at the talkies this year. Not just because One Battle After Another features some terrific performances (Chase Infiniti in her first feature roll is a revelation, while\u00a0Sean Penn and his Tom Waits<\/strong><\/a>-pitched timbre steals the show), looks incredible (thank you VistaVision) and sounds superb (courtesy of Jonny Greenwood, signing his fifth PTA score), but because PTA achieves something uniquely unclassifiable.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a paranoid and propulsive thriller, whose frantic pace is a joy to experience.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a stoner adventure with Chaplin-esque slapstick and a sense of humour that never feels forced when it’s not busy hitting all its marks.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a zany Dr. Strangelove-like\u00a0farce\u00a0about those who seek \u201cpurity” but end up as\u00a0hilarious caricatures of\u00a0power-hungry, virility-straining buffoons we are subjected to on a daily basis on the news.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a criticism of power structures, doubling up as a reminder that those who are the most radical can often be the most cowardly; that good-intentioned idealists may not always practice what they preach; and that those trying to be strongmen\u00a0are actually weak.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an incisive\u00a0yet never hectoring look at a divided America – not just limited to Trump\u2019s but heavily inspired by\u00a0its current\u00a0supremacist excesses\u00a0– where right-wing and leftist extremism are two sides of the same\u00a0coin, both indicating that heartlessness will be our undoing.<\/p>\n

And beyond its rallying cry against dogmatism in all its forms, it\u2019s a moving and humanistic tale about a bath-robed dad having a terrible day, trying his level best to protect his teenage daughter from inheriting his past.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s deep. It\u2019s light. In short, it\u2019s a modern classic.<\/p>\n

\"One<\/span><\/div>\n

One Battle After Another <\/span> – Warner Bros. Pictures <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMake it good. Make it bright. Impress me,\u201d Perfidia orders Pat during their Mexico mission. PTA\u2019s ticked all three boxes.<\/p>\n

So, Viva la Revoluci\u00f3n, down with the Christmas Adventurers, and get thee to a cinema. In doing so, you\u2019ll get to watch one of 2025\u2019s most unmissable\u00a0theatrical offerings and send a message of your own to those bankrolling daring and entertaining cinema like PTA\u2019s bravura filmmaking: More of this please.<\/p>\n

One Battle After Another is out in cinemas now.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source ca.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s hardly a piping hot take to say that Paul Thomas Anderson has not made a bad film. From his breakout second feature Boogie Nights to his misunderstood romantic comedy Phantom Thread, via the Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood and the Silver Lion-nabbing The Master, the American filmmaker has consistently proven that he\u2019s in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2051761,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[366356,344285,367628,381096,333476,374584,378918,48398,357900,306876],"class_list":["post-2051760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-battle","tag-bob-ferguson","tag-chase-infiniti","tag-licorice-pizza","tag-paul-thomas-anderson","tag-perfidia","tag-pta","tag-sean-penn","tag-thomas-pynchon","tag-warner-bros"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Euronews-Cultures-Film-of-the-Week-\u2018One-Battle-After-Another.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2051760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2051761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2051760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2051760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2051760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}