One Battle After Another

“Paul Thomas Anderson's vision is unsparing, for both sides in this apparently eternal face-off between the rebels and the system — even as life carries on, unironically. The irony of these real and imagined borders renting America is captured by Anderson in all its fullness – from its absurdity to its tragedy.”

“The film is flat-out fantastic. I won't lie that it's PTA's masterpiece. That evaluation will depend on taste, and for me his masterpieces are The Master, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood.”

“A remarkably propulsive, fun, and eventually moving piece of work about the human beings caught up in the chaotic machine.”

“One Battle After Another is at once serious and unserious, exciting and baffling, a tonal fusion sending that crazy fizz across the VistaVision screen – an acquired taste, yes, but addictive. These ideas are very unfashionable in the US right now, which only makes this film more interesting: it is about dissent and discontent, and the lonely heroism of not fitting in.”

“Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn Are Brilliant in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Mesmerizing Vision of a Police-State America”

“This is an extraordinary crackerjack hell of a film that has met its time. Mindbending brilliance doesn't begin to describe it. If you think you have seen anything remotely like this masterpiece from Paul Thomas Anderson, think again.”

“Paul Thomas Anderson's paranoid comedy-thriller epic is the first movie of its size to fully crystallize how insane it feels to be alive right now.”

“One Battle After Another is rife with big ideas, but it's never didactic; it's too committed to emotionally investing the audience. The whole movie is similarly daunted by how dark our current political battles have become, yet it strains for optimism throughout. More often than not, they succeed. So, too, does the film: It's an emotional, visceral triumph.”

“Paul Thomas Anderson's nearly three-hour political tragi-farce tries to do everything, but stops short of success.”

“One Battle After Another is a furious film, a richly engaging and persuasive polemic from a filmmaker who has never shied from provocation but who has not before spoken so directly to his audience. Anderson does not operate with blinkered hope; his movie pays sober reverence to the brutal losses suffered already and to those inevitably to come. But he insists, in his film's glorious and just-shy-of-corny final seconds, that there is still something like a future out there, past the smoke and ruin, worth struggling toward, inch by agonizing inch.”