One Battle After Another, Best Picture
Paul Thomas Anderson's Take on Pynfhon's Vineland
By: Susan Hall - Jan 05, 2026
One Battle After Another comes out of the starting gate in first place, a position it deserves to keep. It has just won the Critics’ Choice Best Picture Award, along with Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.
While we should not judge a film by its loyalty to an underlying property, if you like Thomas Pynchon—whose Vineland is the basis of the Paul Thomas Anderson work—you’ll love this film.
If car chases are one of your things, you’ve never seen ones like those on this screen.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn both deliver performances as good as any they’ve ever done, and they are tried-and-true top performers.
For anyone looking out their front window today, you feel the times in which we live: revolutionaries are pitted against tyrants. The outcome is not clear. Or so we fear.
This heavy-duty idea lofts the film. Yet is remains is thoroughly entertaining.
In contrast to Marty Supreme, for instance—whose promos place it somewhere on a spectrum including a 1950s national portrait (no), a picture of ambition after World War II (no), and the quintessential American hustler (the film itself does hustle the audience)—One Battle After Another uses film techniques that truly engage. The close-up puts us right next to the character, but room is always left for performance. Josh Safdie, flying solo in Marty, completely covers what could be considered performance with camera angles and moving bodies. Paul Thomas Anderson engages us with camera and cutting, but leaves us space to engage with cosmic performances. At the end of the film, we feel richly rewarded. Marty Supreme leaves us on empty, at best hustled.
Visually, a revolutionary, Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), is portrayed with a shotgun resting on her nine-month-pregnant belly, undisturbed by the prospect of motherhood. Shocks are built in, not added on—unlike the shootout over a dog in Marty Supreme.
The two films are not really comparable, yet comparisons about gripping camera technique and its relationship to performance are fair. Marty Supreme goes down the drain with its cutting. One Battle After Another keeps all the aspects of a great film in balance.
One Battle After Another is truly timeless. A man was arrested early on the morning of January 5th after causing property damage, including breaking exterior windows, at Vice President J.D. Vance’s Cincinnati home while the Vance family was away. Secret Service and Cincinnati police responded to the incident, which is now under investigation for potential charges.
With tyranny lurking not so subtly in the White House, we wake up daily to the confrontation between 'revolutionary' democratic ideas and the illegitimate seizure of power.
Don’t worry about a heavy hand in One Battle After Another. It is relevant, yes. Yet it’s tremendously entertaining, darkly funny, and a treat.
The film of the year.