<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no one way to measure when a movie enters the cultural bloodstream \u2014 I mean, when it does so as powerfully as a shot of heroin. But when it happens, you can feel it. It used to happen a lot, but it\u2019s rarer in the world we live in today, which is swimming in a universe of content, most of it splintered into separate silos. The phrase \u201cmass culture\u201d used to be synonymous with \u201chit television\u201d or \u201cblockbuster movie,\u201d but even those things aren\u2019t the dominating, all-eyes-on-this, collective-attention-grabbing forces they once were. All of which makes Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d a grand throwback, the all-too-rare movie that has the chance to dominate the cultural conversation.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s be clear about why that could happen. \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d is a movie that connects with the moment we\u2019re in like nothing you\u2019ve seen \u2014 and the moment we\u2019re in is like nothing you\u2019ve seen. As the United States gets pushed, day by day, closer and closer to autocracy, that\u2019s a situation that ought to be setting everyone in the country on edge. Yet it\u2019s part of the nature of autocracy to narcotize people into numbness, delusion, fear, and a kind of self-perpetuating apathy. And that\u2019s what seems to be happening in America right now. Gavin Newsom shouldn\u2019t be the only one saying that we\u2019re in danger of not having real elections in 2028; tons of people (leaders, citizens, journalists) should be saying it. But too many of us are caught in a zone halfway between resistance and despair, and that\u2019s the mood that \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d taps into.<\/p>\n
More from Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s set in a police-state America that looks and feels like the one America could be turning into in a few years. And what\u2019s uncanny about the film isn\u2019t just the prophetic quality of its authoritarian setting. (No, this is not \u201cThe Hunger Games.\u201d) It\u2019s the way that \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d asks us, for two hours and 41 minutes, to live inside the cave of our anxiety and outrage, our passivity and rebellion; it\u2019s the way the film provokes shocks of recognition and a kind of suck-in-your-breath catharsis. It\u2019s a movie that works as a heightened mirror.<\/p>\n Based on its ecstatic reviews, the out-of-the-gate intensity of its awards buzz, the fact that the film\u2019s solid box-office performance this weekend indicates that people chose to listen to the critics (something that doesn\u2019t exactly happen every day), and the general vibe of excitement over the film that\u2019s been coursing through social media, I think \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d has the potential to be a sensation \u2014 not just the rare drama for adults that becomes a hit, but a movie that provokes a thousand conversations and creates its own energy field. Even hit movies hardly do that anymore, and a lot of the films that critics champion tend to provoke a conversation-in-a-bubble. I think that\u2019s what happened last year with \u201cAnora\u201d and \u201cThe Brutalist,\u201d and maybe this year with \u201cMaterialists,\u201d a good rom-com that set the chattering classes on both coasts talking about the place where romance meets the price of real estate.<\/p>\n \u201cOne Battle After Another,\u201d on the other hand, is a wildly entertaining, awesomely unpredictable screwball political thriller that on some level forces you to confront\u2026the fate of our fucking country. It gets you to ask: What\u2019s happening to America? Where is this all going? Will it turn out to be as threatening as the movie makes it look? That, in a way, is a question as scary as anything in \u201cJaws,\u201d and \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d could be the rare film that electrifies audiences because it connects directly with what\u2019s happening in their lives.<\/p>\n To think of a movie that hit the zeitgeist jackpot the way this one does, you might have to go back to \u201cWall Street,\u201d the Oliver Stone finance drama that had the good fortune to open just seven weeks after the 1987 stock-market crash. It\u2019s as if that movie had been designed as headline-channeling hangover therapy for the Greed Decade. Before that, \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men,\u201d though it came out two years after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, was close enough in time to the Watergate scandal to act as a national referendum on what the country had been through, how it shocked our values and in some ways reshaped them.<\/p>\n On that score, \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d almost seems to be opening in the exact right week. The Jimmy Kimmel saga, which proved to be a major victory for freedom of speech, was an inflection point. So, it seems, is the indictment of James Comey. (We can only hope that one ends as triumphantly as Kimmel.) These seismic events just fuel the movie\u2019s urgency. On the scale of sheer relevance, \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d is a 10 out of 10, but as staged by Anderson, working at the peak of his powers, it\u2019s also the kind of galvanic and enveloping movie that imprints its themes onto your headspace. You want to think about it, talk about it, debate it.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a prediction that sounds counterintuitive, but I\u2019ll stand by it: I think a solid segment of the audience for this movie is going to come from the right. The red-state demo has tended to shun films like \u201cCivil War,\u201d which it views as liberal-left agit-prop, but I suspect that there\u2019s something about the big vision of \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d that could prove uniquely inviting. (It doesn\u2019t hurt to have Leonardo DiCaprio giving his most inspired and relatable performance in years.) The film depicts an underground band of revolutionary guerrillas, but instead of holding them up as shining heroes, it portrays them in shades of gray, spotlighting their na\u00efvet\u00e9 and selfishness. And Sean Penn\u2019s portrayal of the Army despot Col. Lockjaw is a satire of control-freak military manners flecked with humanity. I think people on the right will go to see \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d for the best reason: They\u2019ll be curious about it. And just maybe, in ways they will or will not acknowledge, it could wind up speaking to them. In a world where Ted Cruz could take a stand against President Trump during the Jimmy Kimmel saga, I think the message is: Many things are not set in stone.<\/p>\n I\u2019m excited to see a big movie that boldly confronts our budding American autocracy, and that showcases a view of Christian nationalism that\u2019s notably scathing. Yet I\u2019m also excited to see a movie that simply reminds us of how much movies can still matter. One felt that sensation, to a degree, with \u201cSinners,\u201d a vampire thriller that deconstructed America\u2019s racial heritage. Yet even \u201cSinners\u201d didn\u2019t have what \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d does \u2014 the power to immerse us in the present-tense cataclysm of a country, our country, where the very concept of freedom may be falling apart. The cultural heat on a movie like this one could be a small step toward putting it back together.<\/p>\n Best of Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/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":" There\u2019s no one way to measure when a movie enters the cultural bloodstream \u2014 I mean, when it does so as powerfully as a shot of heroin. But when it happens, you can feel it. It used to happen a lot, but it\u2019s rarer in the world we live in today, which is swimming in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2054271,"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":[366356,360592,333476,25432],"class_list":["post-2054270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-battle","tag-blockbuster-movie","tag-paul-thomas-anderson","tag-united-states"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/\u2018One-Battle-After-Another-With-Its-Thriller-Vision-of-Authoritarianism.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054270","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=2054270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2054271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2054270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2054270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2054270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}