It is a good custom for the writer to inform the readers about potential biases he might harbor, so I'll start by stating that Paul Thomas Anderson is probably my favorite contemporary director. As of 2025, There Will Be Blood is still, in my humble opinion, the best film of the 21st century. The Master and Magnolia are true, at times hermetic, works of art. Boogie Nights is one of the defining films of the 90s and Licorice Pizza is simply enchanting. Anderson’s latest film, One Battle After Another, was therefore my most anticipated release this year. However, after having watched it on a glorious 70mm print, I was left questioning if this film is less a piece of art and more a piece of propaganda.
If you want to go into the film “blind”, you should return to this article after watching it for yourself. The film focusses on the “resistance group” the French 75 (both the name of a cannon the French used in World War 1, and of a very tasty champagne cocktail), a band of left-wing terrorists who targets public institutions and border facilities, financing themselves with bank heists. Our protagonists, in the first half of the film, are Pat Calhoun (later “Bob Ferguson”) (Leonardo DiCaprio), a bomb-builder, and his lover, “Perfidia Beverly Hills” (Teyana Taylor), a self-proclaimed “black warrior”. During an attack on a border control post, Perfidia meets the racist (and quite perverse) soldier Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (a very buff Sean Penn), who develops a strange sexual obsession with the radical woman, which is, to put it mildly, reciprocated. In the story, Pat has a daughter with Perfidia (or has he?), Willa. Things go awry, when Perfidia is caught after a botched bank heist—by none other than Col. Lockjaw. To save herself, she joins the Witness Protection Program and informs on her fellow revolutionaries, then flees to Mexico ...
