Why ‘One Battle After Another' is the best film of 2025

Leonardo DiCaprio has repeatedly said that he drew heavily from The Big Lebowski to portray a stoned ex-revolutionary in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another—by far the finest English language film of last year. In the Oscar-nominated film (available now for rent on Apple TV), DiCaprio’s character does indeed capture a scruffy slacker energy reminiscent of the “Dude” played so unforgettably by Jeff Bridges in the Coen Brothers film, a shaggy dog of a man who stirred his White Russians with his fingers and waged war over a rug that really held the room together. Against all and dramatically severe odds, The Dude abides.

DiCaprio plays “Rocketman” Bob Ferguson, explosives expert of a revolutionary group called the French 75, who is now old and inactive and happy to get high while watching The Battle of Algiers on TV. He has, crucially, forgotten the secret password he needs in order to activate his fellow radicals. This character shares a direct kinship to The Dude’s bathrobe-wearing, pot-smoking protagonist, but I do believe that Anderson himself has also channelled El Duderino to create this messy and gorgeous tapestry of a film, one where a rug rolls over a “Viva La Revolucion” trap-door, and where things that don’t normally go together team up like peanut butter and jelly.

The background score is discordant and jangly—and anxiety-inducing— while also exquisite (thank you, Jonny Greenwood), the shots of the road in the chase sequence are hypnotic and breathless and made me watch the film on IMAX thrice, there are scenes full to the brim with paranoia and violence and comedy—even farce involving phone-chargers—all at the same time. There are big men who drink small beers, and mighty women who make soldiers their playthings. And then there’s a maniac straight out of a Stanley Kubrick movie who wants to run roughshod over everyone to join a secret cabal that controls America.

One Battle After Another is a wildly loose take on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, an underrated novel that Salman Rushdie, reviewing for The New York Times, called “a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years.” With this film made 35 years later, Anderson has found even more political resonance and potency, and created an extraordinarily timely work of art at a moment when our revolutionaries-to-be may be too distracted by doomscrolling and too caught up in nomenclature. The enemy is controlled and well-armed and relentless, while here we are forgetting our passwords and reliving the nostalgic warmth of triumphant old movies.

The bombs have fizzled out.

Teyana Taylor plays Perfidia Beverly Hills, an electrifying revolutionary who gets off on danger and never backs down. The screen feels singed when she blazes through it, all edge and passion and unrequited radicalism. It is a straight-up iconic performance, with the poster-worthy imagery of a pregnant Perfidia rattling off a machine gun, and lines that belong on T-shirts. The way Taylor plays it, even as she gets involved with armed men on either side of the divide, her allegiance is never once in question. She is revolution.

Sean Penn plays Colonel Steven Lockjaw, a brutal—and impossibly well-named—character who didn’t exist in the book. He is all grunts and tight T-shirts, a villain of efficiency and ruthlessness, though his hyper-violent and overcaffeinated focus keeps blurring because of his forbidden sexual urges, and his overarching desire to be one of the men who manages the world. (“Oh Mommy,” he exclaims in disbelief when he thinks he has made it.) Wearing the most unforgettably-parted hairdo since Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, Penn is transformatively stunning, every breath full of guns, germs and steel. When his lady doesn’t answer the front door, he is ready with a battering ram.

This is also a father-daughter film, with DiCaprio’s slacker struggling to raise his incredibly feisty daughter Willa, played by the gifted, and cinematically named, Chase Infiniti. Some of the film’s scariest parts are shouldered by Willa, a character defiantly grappling with her own origins, with DiCaprio huffing breathlessly to keep up with her. In the midst of this chaotic edge-of-the-seat thriller, Anderson captures the precarious frailty of that relationship, reminding us that parenthood is a long road.

What roads! Cinematographer Michael Bauman, filming in VistaVision, follows cars in frantic pursuit on Highway 78, and shoots the road with long 70-120mm lenses that make us feel nose to the road for a visceral, low-angle rush. It’s a mesmerising roller-coaster, leaving us to wonder whether we should gape or gasp. The whole film is stunning, with worlds of detail packed into each frame, from the early “dog pound” sequence where soldiers patrol kid-filled cages in a sinisterly long take, to the immigrants housed claustrophobically together in Sensei’s dojo. Every time I watch the film, I discover more.

Sensei—a karatedo instructor played magically by Benicio Del Toro—keeps the fire burning. This may be Rocketman’s story, and DiCaprio is wonderfully hilarious and hapless. Yet it is Del Toro’s quiet revolutionary who knows better than to lie to the police, and who gets things done. Through him, Paul Thomas Anderson offers up a spark of hope that with the right allies, the day may yet be saved. The revolution abides.

Streaming tip of the week:

Nothing can quite top the car-chase in One Battle After Another, but the adrenaline withdrawal you feel after the film may be supplemented by watching Skyscraper Live (Netflix) where you can watch Alex Honnold scale one of the world’s tallest buildings. You’ll gasp.

Raja Sen (@rajasen) is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series.