One Battle After Another (2025): Paul Thomas Anderson's Best Picture Winner Is a Chase Movie With a Broken Heart

Somewhere in the middle of One Battle After Another, a middle-aged ex-revolutionary in a faded bathrobe is hiding out in a city being overrun by soldiers, on the phone to the underground, begging for the one thing he needs: where his missing daughter is. They won't tell him, because he can't remember the password. That's the whole movie in one gag: the fate of a family, a resistance movement and maybe the country, hung up on a guy who smoked away the code words sixteen years ago.

Paul Thomas Anderson's film won Best Picture at the 98th Academy Awards in March, one of six Oscars it took home that night, along with Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn, Best Film Editing for Andy Jurgensen, and the first Oscar ever given for casting, to Cassandra Kulukundis. Prizes aside, it's the rare awards-season heavyweight that plays like a Saturday-night crowd-pleaser: a chase movie, a political satire and a father-daughter story that sneaks up on you. And if you missed it in theaters, you can watch it tonight on HBO Max.

Why It's a Masterpiece

The movie opens with the kind of set piece most films save for their final reel. A radical group called the French 75 storms a migrant detention camp on the U.S.-Mexico border, takes the guards hostage and frees the people held inside. Leading the raid is Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), who singles out the commanding officer, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), and humiliates him in a way that rewires his brain for the next two decades. Brian Tallerico, reviewing it for RogerEbert.com, called it "a live wire that drops in the first scene," and that's exactly right: from there the film never stops throwing sparks.

Then it cuts sixteen years ahead. Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), once the group's explosives man, is living off the grid in Northern California with his and Perfidia's daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), who is now sixteen, sharp and fed up with her stoned, paranoid dad. When Lockjaw resurfaces, Willa is pulled out of a high school dance by an old comrade, Deandra (Regina Hall), and Bob has to become the man he only pretended to be.

What makes it great is how many movies Anderson keeps spinning at once without dropping a plate. Penn plays Lockjaw with a stiff-legged, jaw-clenched vanity that's funny right up until it's terrifying. The villains' secret society, the Christmas Adventurers Club, greets each other with "hail Saint Nick," which sounds like a sketch, until you understand what they're actually after. And DiCaprio, playing a man who is mostly wrong about everything, gives his loosest, most physically ridiculous performance in years. Under all that is something simple and moving: a lousy father who loves his kid more than his own excuses.

Behind the Scenes

Anderson had been circling Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland for years. Asked in 2014, the year of his other Pynchon film, Inherent Vice, whether he'd ever adapt it, he said it was "just too intimidating." The new film isn't a faithful adaptation so much as a loose one; as Time reported, Anderson told an Esquire interview with DiCaprio that he "stole the parts that spoke to me and just started running like a thief." What he kept is the core: a burned-out radical, a teenage daughter, and a government man who won't let the past go.

He shot it big. Cinematographer Michael Bauman filmed in VistaVision, a 1950s format that runs 35mm film sideways through the camera so each frame covers eight perforations instead of four, giving a much larger, sharper negative. It's also a beast to work with. Bauman told MovieMaker that a thousand-foot magazine lasted only four to five minutes, versus about eleven on standard 35mm, that the camera would jam, and that the crew went through 1.5 million feet of film. Variety reported a budget of $130 million, Anderson's biggest yet, but Bauman said the director wanted "as small of a footprint as possible," with the rough, run-and-gun feel of 1970s pictures like The French Connection, which became the crew's "north star."

Nearly everything was shot on real locations, from Eureka and Sacramento to El Paso, Texas, where the city gave the production access to downtown for the riot and the first chase. According to Bauman, the only thing built on a soundstage was the tunnel Bob crawls through to pop up at a tree stump. Sensei's apartment complex, where Benicio Del Toro's karate teacher runs a safe house for people fleeing the raids, was a full set built inside a real building by production designer Florencia Martin and her team.

Anderson also left the door open for accidents. Bauman remembers the cast improvising constantly, and one of the film's best scenes, Perfidia deciding to leave her baby and go back to the fight, was played loose with the set cleared down to Bauman and gaffer Justin Dickson holding a single movable light. They did around eight takes, and Taylor pushed further every time.

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

• The falling curtains. When Bob bursts into Sensei's apartment and tries to yank the curtains shut, they come crashing down. That wasn't in the script. Bauman says the curtains were simply rigged badly, and DiCaprio kept going, which made the panic feel even more real.
• The light changes with the danger. Watch the colors in the El Paso stretch: fluorescent green in the dojo, warmer tones inside the apartment, then cold cyan and blue once the military raids the complex.
• The road has a name. The rolling desert highway in the finale, near Highway 78 outside Borrego Springs, California, was nicknamed the "River of Hills" by the production. Supervising location manager Michael Glaser found it while scouting for a different scene.
• Toy cars. Anderson, stunt coordinator Brian Machleit and the team blocked the chase with Matchbox cars so every move would feel like a split-second decision rather than choreography.
• The score's strange voice. Jonny Greenwood's music, eighteen pieces recorded with the London Contemporary Orchestra, leans on jittery piano and percussion, and Greenwood himself plays the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument whose eerie, wavering tone you'll hear threading through the tension.

The Director's Genius Moment

Spoiler warning: This section describes the final chase and how it ends.

The climax is a three-car chase over that River of Hills. Willa is in a stolen car, Lockjaw is behind her in a government SUV, and behind him, unseen, is Tim Smith (John Hoogenakker), a hitman sent by the Christmas Adventurers Club to erase Lockjaw for the crime of fathering a mixed-race child. The road rises and falls like ocean swells, so the cars keep vanishing and reappearing. Every crest is a reveal; every dip is a few seconds of blindness.

Anderson stages it as a puzzle instead of a demolition derby. Smith pulls alongside Lockjaw and shoots him through the window. Then Willa, alone with a faster car closing in, does the smart thing: she stops on the steep far side of a hill, where Smith can't see her, and lets him plow into her at the crest. When he staggers out of the wreck, she's waiting with a gun.

Bauman told MovieMaker that the sound and music make the scene, describing how Greenwood brings in the drums, layers in the strings, drops the drums out, and then slams them back in the moment Willa sees the car come over the hill. Anderson, for his part, said the best part of finding the road was that it let Willa "take the high ground," and that's the genius of it: the location itself becomes the plot. A teenage girl beats a professional killer by understanding the landscape better than he does.

Another Way to See It

It's tempting to watch One Battle After Another as a headline movie, and plenty of people did: immigration raids, militarized cities, white supremacists in suits. But Tallerico points out that Anderson also nods to The Battle of Algiers and the sins of the Founding Fathers, and the film is less interested in this year's news than in the long, exhausting fact that, as the title says, the fight never ends.

That's why the last scene lands so softly. Back home, Bob is fumbling with a selfie while Willa hears about a protest in Oakland on the police scanner. He points out it's three hours away; she's already grabbing her jacket. "Be safe," he says. "You know I won't," she answers. The baton passes from a father who spent sixteen years hiding to a daughter who won't. Seen this way, it's a coming-of-age movie disguised as an action movie, and Bob's real heroism isn't anything he does with a gun. It's that he finally lets her go.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, and ideally on the biggest screen you've got. This is a movie built for momentum: it runs well over two and a half hours and feels like half that. It's rated R, so it's not one for the kids, and if you want a tidy political lecture, look elsewhere. Anderson is more interested in people than positions.

But if you want to see one of the best American filmmakers working at full throttle, with DiCaprio at his goofiest, Penn at his scariest, Teyana Taylor setting the screen on fire and Chase Infiniti holding her own against all of them, this is the one. One Battle After Another is streaming on HBO Max in the U.S., and it's also available to buy on the major digital stores.