leonardo di caprio

In the action/comedy/thriller One Battle After Another director Paul Thomas Anderson gives us a paragon of top-notch film-making, outstanding from a technical viewpoint and electrifying as cinema to boot. But what really won me over is the “dad” story at the center of it all. Fellow revolutionaries and lovers Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) are committed to changing the world through acts of sabotage that disrupt the flow of money to the top while not hurting people. But when Perfidia becomes pregnant and gives birth, everything changes

The revolution might not be televised, to paraphrase a ’70s song, but it rages on in One Battle After Another, a kinetic and often darkly comedic film about political stances and personal consequences. Gil Scott-Heron’s famous Black Liberation song is just one of the threads in writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s tapestry about a group of radicals, the authorities after them, and a young woman caught in the middle.

A big glorious hunk of a film: brash, chaotic, despairing about the state of the nation but trying to find a way to survive it. It’s shocking to see that a big-budget studio endeavor with blockbuster vibes over an anarchic indie heart got produced at all, even a few years ago. It’s impossible to imagine that we will see its like again anytime soon.