Movie Reviews
Review: Paul Thomas Anderson's 'One Battle After Another'
Vague Visages’ One Battle After Another review contains minor spoilers. Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2025 movie features Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.
Few directors wear their influences on their sleeves as openly as Paul Thomas Anderson; only his friend Quentin Tarantino even comes up in the conversation when discussing major auteurs whose distinctive styles are built entirely from overt homage. But whereas Tarantino’s philosophies and quirks can often be heard pouring out of the mouths of his characters in each fast-paced dialogue exchange, you’d be hard pressed to find any similar example of Anderson placing himself in the shoes of genre movie protagonists he grew up idolizing. He’s a San Fernando Valley native who, up until this point, appears to have suggested that the film with the closest personal correlation to his life is the London-set Phantom Thread (2017), which he’s characterized as a romantic comedy loosely inspired by the time his wife (the actress Maya Rudolph) looked after him when he came down with the flu. It’s a period drama set in the 1950s fashion world in which the uptight protagonist’s partner poisons him with mushrooms so he won’t take her caring for granted. Unsurprisingly, a direct autobiography is something Anderson’s work has frequently proved he couldn’t be less interested in.
With One Battle After Another, Anderson uses the skeleton of Thomas Pynchon’s satirical 1990 novel Vineland — an expansive tale about a group of 1960s American idealists being targeted in a sting operation — to tell what appears to be his most nakedly personal tale to date. Updating the novel’s setting to a California that could either be a post-Donald Trump dystopia or a snapshot of any period following the paranoid outbreak of George W. Bush’s War on Terror, the rallying cries of its leftist revolutionary protagonists are less impactful than the family drama it’s all grounded within. The reason many have been quick to embrace a film with very purposefully divisive politics is the overriding sentiment of a father (Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson, in another stellar performance likely to be underrated) reckoning with his daughter’s safety in an authoritarian world he wasn’t powerful enough to stop coming into being. That this is a white father with a biracial daughter whose life experiences will be more difficult than he can immediately comprehend suggests that, even if Bob is far from a director surrogate, he’s a fleshed-out personification of Anderson’s own parental anxieties as a father of mixed-race children. The director may often hide his emotions under the veil of homage; however, with One Battle After Mother, he’s never been more openly sentimental, at least since his 1999 film Magnolia.
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<p><em>One Battle After Another’s</em> extensive opening prologue focuses on Ghetto Pat (the former alias of DiCaprio’s character) and his partner Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), who lead the revolutionary group French ‘75. Introduced freeing masses of immigrants from a detention center near the Mexican border, the group crosses paths with Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), an openly racist and high-ranking figure who nevertheless fetishizes Black women (his first introduction to Perfidia at gunpoint immediately ignites a sexual obsession). It’s something of a victory for media literacy that the framing of these sequences hasn’t yet led to accusations that Anderson plays into the very behavior he’s satirizes, with one POV shot from Lockjaw’s perspective lingering on Taylor’s posterior like the heroine of a Michael Bay <i>Transformers </i>movie. Lockjaw’s racism clouds that he’s a misogynist too, and witnessing the strong women of the French ‘75 turns him on — not through the idea of them domineering him, but through the idea that he’d be the one able to control them. And seeing Pat embrace Perfidia seconds later throws hot water on that fantasy.
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<p>Pat and Perfidia have a daughter, but as the latest in a long family line of revolutionaries, Taylor’s character doesn’t want to settle down and be a parent. A failed heist leads to her capture by Lockjaw, her safety only guaranteed by ratting on her group members (who are subsequently executed one by one) before fleeing to Mexico, where she’s never heard of again. Pat is given a new identity for himself and his daughter before he can be killed. Suddenly, Anderson picks up 16 years when the now teenage Willa (Chase Infiniti) is being hunted down by Lockjaw and a justice department looking to tie up some loose ends, which include finally tracking down the revolutionary now known as Bob.
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<p>Pynchon’s source novel is labyrinthine, a series of richly detailed and intersecting anecdotes surrounding a revolutionary group which doesn’t have ramifications in its present day until the very last chapters. <i>One Battle After Another</i> doesn’t devote time to character backstories, as exposition only appears within propulsive action sequences, but the film does share Pynchon’s fascination with the secret societies formed in the crevices of this dystopia. In <i>Vineland</i>, much ink was spilled building out various government initiatives, leading up to expansive side plots centered around creations like College of the Surf, an institution designed to lure society’s idealists and transform them into Nixonian government stooges. Anderson, on the other hand, is a far more lowbrow storyteller, which I say as a compliment. He waters down the elaborate, period-specific satire for broader gags, like a white supremacist society known as the Christmas Adventurers Club, which Lockjaw is desperate to become a member of.
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<p>Anderson’s simplifying of denser satirical ideas is, of course, a likely byproduct of having a $130 million studio budget, but more crucially, it’s because the kind of right-wing authoritarianism being parodied has grown even less sophisticated since the 1990 publication of Pynchon’s novel. Refreshingly, there is no overt Trump parallel in <em>One Battle After Another</em> (<i>Mickey 17</i>, this is thankfully not), nor are there references to the MAGA movement, with Lockjaw and his deep-state networks all representing the kind of ridiculousness within contemporary fascism that has made many disarmed to the evil of the politics they represent. Penn’s character is written as the same kind of macho alpha male as a Vladimir Putin or a Jair Bolsonaro, yet he’s styled as something far more flamboyant, with a penchant for wearing tight t-shirts which occasionally bring his sexuality into question. Colonel Lockjaw immediately looks immediately, and Penn leans into this with a silent comedy physicality to his every movement. And yet this laughable exterior does little to hide the insidiousness of the character’s politics. Even if viewers might laugh at Colonel Lockjaw, Anderson is keen to remind audiences that viewing fascist figures in this way, divorced from their beliefs, does nothing to stop their abhorrent worldviews from becoming normalized.
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Categories: 2020s, 2025 Film Reviews, Action, Crime, Dark Comedy, Drama, Featured, Film, Movies, Thriller
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<p>DiCaprio’s Bob is also a laughable figure, the personification of the long-standing observation that left-wing movements are always derailed by the lack of basic organization skills from everybody involved in them. But even as he’s also a hot-tempered man out of time — at one point yelling at his daughter’s boyfriend in a doorway like Martin Lawrence’s Marcus Burnett in the 2003 film<i> Bad Boys II</i>, because, yes, there are numerous parallels to Michael Bay’s oeuvre here — Anderson has no interest in taking the toothless mentality of many a political satire and suggesting both sides are as bad as each other. Bob is unsuited to the rescue operation he’s entrusted with, but his return to the world of underground revolutionaries — which, now as a crotchety middle-aged man, he’s frequently irritated by — isn’t pitched as a joke at the expense of such movements. Instead, through the eyes of a man who grew disillusioned with the revolutionary life, Anderson allows audiences to view the stakes from a father’s perspective, rather than a wannabe Che Guevara’s. The personal and the political are always entwined in <em>One Battle After Another</em>, but there’s an elegance in how the writer/director manages to re-contextualize a heightened war between rivaling factions as straightforwardly humanist without watering down any of the characters’ world views. Even as the film is nakedly about a father’s struggle to save his daughter, Anderson wants viewers to meet the protagonist on his political terms, which –even as he’s grown older and grumpier — are still further to the left than most of the likely audience.
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<p>Is it a surprise that a movie which feels like such a powder keg in the current moment has become universally embraced? Undoubtedly. And a critical anomaly like Anderson’s 2025 film couldn’t be more welcome, as there’s an appetite for cinema that isn’t afraid to address the divisions of the modern era without hiding behind an allegory. In <em>One Battle After Another</em>, the political is inextricable from the personal, in a way that transcends a mere commentary on Trump’s America. If we woke up tomorrow in a utopia, Anderson’s father/daughter tale would resonate just as strongly as it does right now.
<p><em>Alistair Ryder (<a rel=)
@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.
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PopHorror had the chance to check out Anacoreta (2022) ahead of its streaming release! Does this meta-horror flick provide interesting story telling or is it a confusing mess.
Let’s have a look…
Synopsis
A group of friends heads to a secluded woodland cabin for a weekend getaway, planning to film an experimental horror movie. As the shoot progresses, the project begins to fall apart—until a real and terrifying presence emerges from the darkness.
Anacoreta is directed by Jeremy Schuetze. It was written by Jeremy Schuetze and Matt Visser. The film stars Antonia Thomas (Bagman 2024), Jesse Stanley (Raf 2019), Jeremy Schuetze (Jennifer’s Body 2009), and Matt Visser (A Lot Like Christmas 2021)
My Thoughts
Antonia Thomas delivered an outstanding performance as the female lead in Anacoreta. It was remarkable to watch her convey such a wide range of emotions with authenticity and depth. I was continually impressed by her ability to switch seamlessly between different dialects. I absolutely loved her delivery of the dialogue of telling The Scorpion and the Frog fable.
Anacoreta employs a distinctive, meta-horror style of storytelling. The narrative follows a group of friends creating a “scripted reality” horror film, and as the plot unfolds, the boundary between their staged production and their actual lives becomes increasingly blurred. This was interesting, but at the same time frustrating as a viewer.
Check out Anacoreta on Prime Video and let us know your thoughts!
“So it’s like Avatar?” one character quips in Disney and Pixar’s “Hoppers,” bluntly translating the film’s high-concept premise for the sugar-fueled kids in the audience. And yes, the comparison is apt. The story follows a nature-obsessed teenage girl who manages to quite literally “hop” her consciousness into the body of a robotic beaver in order to spark an animal rebellion against a greedy mayor determined to bulldoze their forest for a freeway.
It’s a clever hook. The kind of big, elastic idea Pixar used to make look effortless. “Hoppers” does not reach the rarified air of “Up,” “Wall-E,” or “Inside Out,” but after a stretch of uneven originals like “Turning Red” and “Luca,” and outright misfires such as “Elemental” and “Elio,” this feels like a genuine course correction. The environmental messaging is clear without being preachy, the animals are irresistibly anthropomorphized, and the studio’s once-signature emotional sincerity is back in sturdy form.
Pixar can afford to gamble on originals when it has a guaranteed cash cow like this summer’s “Toy Story 5” waiting in the wings, but “Hoppers” earns its place in the catalogue. Director Daniel Chong crafts a warm, heartfelt film that occasionally strains under the weight of its own ambition, yet remains grounded by character and theme. Its meditation on conservation and animal displacement feels timely in a way that never tips into after-school-special territory.
We meet Mabel, voiced with bright conviction by Piper Curda, as a child liberating her classroom pets and returning them to the wild. Her moral compass is shaped by her grandmother, voiced by Karen Huie, who imparts wisdom about nature’s sanctity. True to both Pixar tradition and the broader Disney playbook, this beacon of guidance does not survive past the opening act. Loss, after all, is Pixar’s favorite inciting incident.
Years later, Mabel is still fighting the good fight, squaring off against the smarmy Mayor Jerry, voiced with slick menace by Jon Hamm. He plans to flatten the glade where Mabel and her grandmother once found solace. Mabel’s resistance feels noble but futile. The animals have already mysteriously vanished, the machinery is coming, and her last-ditch plan involves luring a beaver back to the abandoned forest in hopes of jumpstarting the ecosystem.
That’s when the film gleefully pivots into mad-scientist territory. At Beaverton University, Mabel discovers her professor, voiced by Kathy Najimy, has developed a device that can project human consciousness into synthetic animals. The process, dubbed “hopping,” allows Mabel to inhabit a robotic beaver and infiltrate the forest from within. It’s an inspired escalation that keeps the film buoyant even when the plotting grows predictable.
Her new posse includes King George, a lovably beaver voiced by Bobby Moynihan with distinct Bing Bong energy; a sharp-tongued bear voiced by Melissa Villaseñor; a regal bird king voiced by the late Isiah Whitlock Jr.; and a fish queen voiced by Ego Nwodim. As is often the case with Pixar, even in its lesser efforts, the world-building is meticulous. The animal hierarchy, complete with titles like “paw of the king,” is layered with jokes that play for kids while slyly winking at adults.
The plot ultimately follows a familiar template. Scrappy underdog rallies community. Corporate villain twirls metaphorical mustache. Emotional third-act sacrifice looms. At times, you can feel the machinery working a little too cleanly. Pixar, and Disney at large, has grown increasingly reliant on sequels and established IP, and “Hoppers” does not radically reinvent the wheel. In an animated landscape where films like “K-Pop: Demon Hunters,” “Across the Spider-Verse,” and “Goat” are pushing stylistic and narrative boundaries, being safe and sturdy may not always be enough.
And yet, there is something refreshing about a Pixar original that remembers how to tug at the heart without squeezing it dry. “Hoppers” is playful, peppered with cheeky needle drops, and builds to a sweet emotional catharsis that may or may not have left this critic a little misty-eyed. It feels earnest and engaged.
“Hoppers” may not be top-tier Pixar. But it is a welcome return to form, a reminder that the studio still knows how to marry big ideas with a bigger heart.
HOPPERS opens in theaters Friday, March 6th.
Just when you think Pixar’s petting-zoo cute new movie “Hoppers” is flagrantly ripping off James Cameron, the characters come clean.
movie review
HOPPERS
Running time: 105 minutes. Rated PG (action/peril, some scary images and mild language). In theaters March 6.
“You guys, this is like ‘Avatar’!,” squeals 19-year-old Mabel (Piper Curda), the studio’s rare college-age heroine.
Shoots back her nutty professor, Dr. Fairfax (Kathy Kajimy): “This is nothing like ‘Avatar!’”
Sorry, Doc, it definitely is. And that’s fine. Placing the smart sci-fi story atop an animated family film feels right for Pixar, which has long fused the technological, the fantastical and the natural into a warm signature blend. Also, come on, “Avatar” is “Dances With Wolves” via “E.T.”
What separates “Hoppers” from the pack of recent Pix flix, which have been wholesome as a church bake sale, is its comic irreverence.
Director Daniel Chong’s original movie is terribly funny, and often in an unfamiliar, warped way for the cerebral and mushy studio. For example, I’ve never witnessed so many speaking characters be killed off in a Pixar movie — and laughed heartily at their offings to boot.
What’s the parallel to Pandora? Mabel, a budding environmental activist, has stumbled on a secret laboratory where her kooky teachers can beam their minds into realistic robot animals in order to study them. They call the devices “hoppers.”
Bold and fiery Mabel — PETA, but palatable — sees an opportunity.
The mayor of Beaverton, Jerry (Jon Hamm), plans to destroy her beloved local pond that’s teeming with wildlife to build an expressway. And the only thing stopping the egomaniacal pol — a more upbeat version of President Business from “The Lego Movie” — is the water’s critters, who have all mysteriously disappeared.
So, Mabel avatars into beaver-bot, and sets off in search of the lost creatures to discover why they’ve left.
From there, the movie written by Jesse Andrews (“Luca”) toys with “Toy Story.” Here’s what mischief fuzzy mammals, birds, reptiles and insects get up to when humans aren’t snooping around. Dance aerobics, it turns out.
Per the usual, “Hoppers” goes deep inside their intricate society. The beasts have a formal political system of antagonistic “Game of Thrones”-like royal houses. The most menacing are the Insect Queen (Meryl Streep — I’d call her a chameleon, but she’s playing a bug), a staunch monarch butterfly and her conniving caterpillar kid (Dave Franco). They’re scheming for power.
Perfectly content with his station is Mabel’s new best furry friend King George (Bobby Moynihan), a gullible beaver who ascended to the throne unexpectedly. He happily enforces “pond rules,” such as, “When you gotta eat, eat.”
That means predators have free rein to nosh on prey, and everybody’s cool with it. Because of bone-dry deliveries, like exhausted office drones, the four-legged cast members are hilarious as they go about their Animal Planet activities.
No surprise — talking lizards, sharks, bears, geese and frogs are the real stars here. They far outshine Mabel, even when she dons beaver attire. Much like a 19-year-old in a job interview, she doesn’t leave much of an impression.
Yes, the teen has a heartfelt motivation: The embattled pond was her late grandma’s favorite place. Mabel promised her that she’d protect it.
But in personality she doesn’t rank as one of Pixar’s most engaging leads, perhaps because she’s past voting age. Mabel is nestled in a nebulous phase between teenage rebellion and adulthood that’s pretty blasé, even if a touch of tension comes from her hiding her Homo sapien identity from her new diminutive pals. When animated, kids make better adventurers, plain and simple.
“Hoppers” continues Pixar’s run of humble, charming originals (“Luca,” “Elio”) in between billion-dollar-grossing, idea-starved sequels (“Inside Out 2,” probably “Toy Story 5”). The Disney-owned studio’s days of irrepressible innovation and unmatched imagination are well behind it. No one’s awed by anything anymore. “Coco,” almost 10 years ago, was their last new property to wow on the scale of peak Pixar.
Look, the new movie is likable and has a brain, heart and ample laughs. That’s more than I can say for most family fare. “A Minecraft Movie” made me wanna hop right out of the theater.
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