OG movie review is trending after the film’s overseas premiere on September 24, 2025. The Pawan Kalyan starrer, directed by Sujeeth, opened with early screenings in the United States before its global release on September 25. The Telugu action crime drama is backed by DVV Entertainment and stars Pawan Kalyan in a powerful gangster role.

Audiences abroad have shared first reactions on social media platforms like X, giving a glimpse of the film’s tone and pacing. These responses highlight both praise for action sequences and criticism for certain story elements. The mixed feedback is shaping initial discussions around one of the year’s most anticipated Telugu films.

OG Movie Review: What Early Reactions Reveal

Set in the 1990s, OG follows Ojas Gambheera, a gangster returning to Bombay after a decade to confront his old rival Omi Bhau. The film features Emraan Hashmi, Priyanka Arul Mohan, Arjun Das, Sriya Reddy, and Prakash Raj in key roles. With music by Thaman S and visuals by Ravi K. Chandran and Manoj Paramahamsa, the film promises a cinematic experience with heavy action and period drama elements.

Overseas audiences who watched the premiere at 12:30 p.m. EST praised the large-scale action choreography. Action directors like Peter Hein, Dhilip Subbarayan, and Stunt Silva contributed to intense sequences. Viewers appreciated Pawan Kalyan’s screen presence, calling his performance “vintage power star.” Some fans, however, felt the screenplay slowed in the second half, with mixed opinions about the climax.

International reports note strong advance booking in the U.S., where pre-release sales outperformed Pawan Kalyan’s previous films. Trade trackers predict a significant opening weekend, though reviews suggest word-of-mouth will play a big role in long-term performance.

Global Buzz and Industry Impact

OG’s early reviews reveal how international audiences perceive Telugu cinema’s growing scale. Positive reactions highlight the film’s technical quality, particularly cinematography and sound design. Critics abroad noted the film’s attempt to blend gangster drama with mass action spectacle.

However, some responses flagged predictable plot elements and lengthy runtime as drawbacks. This may affect repeat viewership in overseas markets, where audiences often prefer tighter narratives. Despite this, the film has already generated strong buzz, ensuring high turnout for its worldwide release on September 25.

In summary, OG movie review reactions show Pawan Kalyan’s charisma continues to draw fans globally. While the action and style impressed many, story execution divided opinion. The coming days will decide how the film performs at the global box office.

FYI (keeping you in the loop)-

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.

One Battle After Another Review: Related — Review: Justin Tipping’s ‘HIM’

One Battle After Another’s 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 Transformers 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.

One Battle After Another Review: Related — Review: Macon Blair’s ‘The Toxic Avenger’

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.

One Battle After Another Review: Related — 12 Angry Films: Sidney Lumet on Justice #1 – ’12 Angry Men’

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. One Battle After Another 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 Vineland, 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.

One Battle After Another Review: Related — ‘Scrooged’ Is Still the Most Modern ‘Christmas Carol’

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 One Battle After Another (Mickey 17, 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.

One Battle After Another Review: Related — Review: Sepideh Farsi’s ‘Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk’

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 Bad Boys II, 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 One Battle After Another, 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.

One Battle After Another Review: Related — Review: Kôji Fukada’s ‘Love on Trial’

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 One Battle After Another, 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.

Alistair Ryder (@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.

One Battle After Another Review: Related — On Power and Pleasure in Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Phantom Thread’

Related

September and October are the horror months—as we approach Halloween, a rapid increase in the output of horror films is always anticipated. This year we have The Conjuring, Black Phone 2, and The Strangers: Chapter 2, among other releases, so evidently, for horror fanatics, this is the best time of the year! Centered around the Halloween festivity, the indie slasher horror, The Jester, returns to our screens with a sequel. Written and directed by Colin Krawchuk, The Jester 2 promises to be more horrifying, more exciting, and more plot-driven than the first installment. The masked villain returns to pester the mortals on Halloween once again, and just like before, it’s almost impossible to escape his spells and tricks. But this time, someone dares to challenge the Jester’s cockiness, and she is just a fifteen-year-old magician!

As usual, the Jester was on the hunt for vulnerable targets, and as soon as night fell, he began stirring up trouble. His first target was a lovestruck young man who never managed to gather the courage to approach his crush. If it would’ve been any other day, you would have run away from a man in a terrifying mask, but it’s Halloween, and the scarier your costume, the cooler you are. So, the Jester had no trouble attracting targets. His innocent victims were always at first impressed by his swift moves and his card tricks, and by the time they realized that he was no ordinary man, the Jester had already set the stage. It was impossible to escape from him, and the interactions always ended with a bloodbath. 

At a diner, the Jester came across a young girl, Max, seated alone at a table. It was obvious that she was a lonely teen and therefore a perfect victim for the masked villain. He followed his usual pattern and gestured for Max to pick a card. He had not the slightest inkling that the young girl seated across from him at the table was a budding magician. She was obsessed with magic tricks, and even though her mother thought it was odd for a fifteen-year-old to be so excited for Halloween, Max genuinely looked forward to a night of trick-or-treating. She was in a gloomy mood before the Jester showed up. She didn’t have friends to hang out with, and her mother was not eager to take her trick-or-treating with her young sister. She also felt extremely self-conscious when her classmates at the diner laughed at her. So, when the Jester showed her a deck of cards, she was delighted. Considering people usually entertained him at first, Jester didn’t really think Max was any different. But in the middle of his trick, when Max enthusiastically exclaimed that she recognized the trick, he was taken by surprise. She took the deck of cards from him and explained how the trick was about to unfold. The Jester didn’t know how to react when Max showed him a trick she’d been practicing recently. The Jester wasn’t impressed; he was rather disappointed and couldn’t figure out how he could have made the mistake of choosing a wrong target. He left the diner, upset, but as you can already guess, the Jester and Max’s interaction was not limited to this one meeting. They crossed paths once again, and this time it was not just for a magic trick. 

The problem with The Jester was the lack of motive. A masked man (with supernatural powers) randomly killing people works for a short film, but when it comes to a feature, it is just not enough. The lack of a motive or a lore to tie things together resulted in a half-baked horror experience. Colin Krawchuk, evidently, made notes, and the sequel tries to compensate for the shortcomings of the first installment. During our conversation with the director, he mentioned that it was only after he was offered to make a sequel that he realized the limitations of having a masked character who only communicated through gestures. The need for someone to explain/communicate the lore or motive behind the Jester resulted in the development of the ‘Max’ character. The fifteen-year-old magician is a great addition to the ‘Jester world.’ Her innocence, her fascination with magic, and her genuine kindness make her a character you would want to root for. While the Jester and Max share the same love for magic, they offer the typical contrast that you would expect from a protagonist and an antagonist. The ending of The Jester 2 is thrilling and laden with suspense. 

Stylistically, The Jester 2 is like any typical low-budget exploitation horror. Some below-par acting from the additional cast, a typical background score with a generous sprinkle of horror sound effects, and a lot of screaming. There were a few funny moments in the sequel, such as the scene where Jester’s tricks didn’t work on a trio of friends. I also chuckled when one of the firefighters ended up with dangling eyeballs; you know it’s just bad prosthetics, and that makes it all the more funny. You would expect such visuals from a low-budget film, and I think that just adds to the overall aesthetics. Also, the Jester’s mask has got an upgrade—it’s way creepier and makes his appearance a lot more sinister than in the first installment. 

Kaitlyn Trentham delivers a convincing performance as Max. Michael Sheffield has been playing the Jester consistently since the short film days, and clearly he has brilliantly embodied the character. From a series of short films to now a feature sequel, Colin Krawchuk’s The Jester franchise has come a long, long way. We all love a good slasher, especially one that has a masked killer involved, and perhaps that explains why the Jester is returning to our screens. The Jester 2 is going to be an entertaining watch if you belong to the dedicated fan base for low-budget indie horrors. Setting aside the stylistic preference, The Jester 2 undoubtedly redeems itself after a lackluster first installment. I won’t recommend it if you’re searching for an edge-of-the-seat experience, but if you’re on the lookout for a popcorn horror flick, then The Jester 2 is just the right fix. 

Related