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Cinema, Oscar Bingo, Reviews

Cinema Review: One Battle After Another (2025) – an exhilarating revolutionary romp that lacks the depth of those films it attempts to emulate!

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Cinema Review: One Battle After Another (2025)

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Written by Paul Thomas Anderson

Inspired by Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

Produced by Adam Somner, Sara Murphy, Paul Thomas Anderson

Main Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti, Wood Harris, Tony Goldwyn, Kevin Tighe, Shayna McHayle, etc.

Cinematography by Michael Bauman

Music by Jonny Greenwood

*** CONTAINS SPOILERS ***

It’s a brave filmmaker that quotes one of the greatest revolutionary films of all time during it’s runtime, namely Battle of Algiers (1966). But Paul Thomas Anderson’s formidable cinematic career more than earns him the right to quote a film as towering as The Battle of Algiers (1966) in his latest release One Battle After Another (2025).

Across works like Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999), he has demonstrated a mastery of ensemble storytelling and emotional crescendo; with Punch-Drunk Love (2002) he revealed a gift for intimate, offbeat romance; and in There Will Be Blood (2007) and Phantom Thread (2017) he proved himself one of the most rigorous visual stylists and psychological dramatists of his generation. Such a body of work grants him the authority to converse with cinema’s political masterpieces, even if his more recent Licorice Pizza (2021) felt comparatively diffuse and lacking in urgency. His filmography, at its strongest, stands as evidence of a filmmaker deeply attuned to the legacies and possibilities of the medium.

Having said that, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) wields revolutionary power through its raw immediacy, embedding viewers in the lived experience of anti-colonial struggle with a documentary-like realism that blurs the line between record and re-creation. By contrast, Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025) approaches revolution less as lived history than as a cinematic genre to be emulated, drawing on the tropes and textures of upheaval without grounding itself in the direct urgency of political struggle. Where Pontecorvo conjures revolution as something happening before our eyes, Anderson refracts it through the prism of style, making revolution as much a matter of aesthetic construction as lived reality. It is during its lengthy running time extremely entertaining though.

The opening hour is fast-paced and crams in a lot of action and personality. It establishes a fine ensemble cast, strong characters, striking palette and compelling themes which bring to life Anderson’s sharply written and fantastically filmed screenplay. The narrative focuses on “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), lovers and leaders of the far-left French 75, who storm detention centres, bomb banks, and sabotage power grids, while their soon-to-become nemesis—Officer Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn)—becomes erotically obsessed with Perfidia, sparing her life when he catches her planting a bomb in exchange for a sexually masochistic tryst. Thus, begins a warped love/hate triangle and rivalry which provides the backbone for the action.

The second hour pivots sharply after establishing Perfidia as a commanding revolutionary presence. The focus pulls to her daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), some sixteen years later, now living off the grid and avoiding all but the most basic technology out of fear of surveillance. ‘Pothead’ Pat, has withered into a paranoid and barely functioning stoner-alcoholic, leaving Willa to emerge as the steadier, more mentally resilient figure in their fractured household. The film undeniably suffers from the absence of Perfidia’s charisma and drive, yet it regains momentum when the now Colonel Lockjaw revives his obsessive pursuit, setting the stage for a tense reconfiguration of the story’s revolutionary stakes.

The acting in One Battle After Another (2025) crackles with intensity, led by standout turns from Taylor, Penn, and crafty scene-stealer, Benicio Del Toro. Further, Anderson’s casting team find some amazing supporting military personnel who deliver with uncanny authenticity. Sean Penn’s performance as a swaggering officer radiates brute masculinity—his very walk and gait dripping with testosterone and worthy of awards consideration on their own. Leonardo DiCaprio, meanwhile, folds another eccentric, messy, and deeply contradictory figure into his already remarkable CV, a creation that resonates with the layered complexity of his recent work in Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). He is actually far more hilarious here, as demonstrated in his desperate attempts to overcome the revolutionary helpline he calls for instructions.

Overall, One Battle After Another (2025) works best as a searing, darkly funny revolutionary black comedy, blending sexual, military, conspiracy, and social politics into a heady mix of action, crime, road movie, and romance tropes. The result is a wildly entertaining visual and musical feast, even if it stops short of delivering true socio-political depth. While the film’s closing stretch leans into deliberate plot ambiguities that complicate its resolution, Anderson ultimately serves up a combative cinematic blast—stylish, sharp, and exhilarating—if just shy of a bona fide classic.

Mark: 8.5 out of 11

BFI, Cinema, Cult Cinema, Reviews

CULT FILM REVIEW: DJANGO (1966)

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CULT FILM REVIEW: DJANGO (1966)

Directed by: Sergio Corbucci

Produced by: Sergio Corbucci, Manolo Bolognini

Screenplay by: Sergio Corbucci, Bruno Corbucci, Franco Rossetti, José Gutiérrez Maesso, Piero Vivarelli, Fernando Di Leo [Uncredited]

Story by: Sergio Corbucci, Bruno Corbucci

Based on: Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa, Ryūzō Kikushima [both uncredited]

Cast: Franco Nero, Loredana Nusciak, José Bódalo, Ángel Álvarez, Eduardo Fajardo

Music by: Luis Bacalov – Theme song sung: by Rocky Roberts

***MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS***

As the crooning voice of Rocky Roberts soars on the soundtrack, a lone figure adorned in dark clothes appears, saddle on his back, dragging a coffin across thick sand. Is he a hero or a criminal or a personification of death? Well, he is all three and his name is Django – the ‘D’ is silent. The opening credits and imagery of Sergio Corbucci’s cult Western, DJANGO (1966), is morbidly iconic, perfectly introducing us to the darkness, intensity and sardonic humour of what is to come.

The narrative of Django (1966) takes the tropes of a singular, tough, uncompromising anti-heroic ex-soldier, who has returned from the American Civil War, moving from town to town searching for the next payday. In the process he plots and wreaks havoc and death to all who stands against him. In his breakthrough role, the cool, handsome and blue-eyed, Franco Nero, is brilliantly cast in a similar part that would make a star of Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars (1964). The similarities do not stop there as Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western was, like Django (1966), heavily influenced by Akiro Kurosawa’s famous Samurai film, Yojimbo (1961). Yet while the stories owe much to Kurosawa’s seminal classic — as the Ronin character sets two opposing gangs against each other — both Leone and Corbucci instil their own distinctive style into their respective films.

Corbucci’s vision is even more cynical and violent than Leone. While Nero’s striking good looks glow like a silent matinee idol, he seemingly kills more soldiers, bandits and assorted bad guys than the Civil war itself. Django is a one-man killing machine and he never flinches at the sight of vermillion carnage. In fact, as a hollow and bitter man who has tasted the tragedy of senseless war, one can assume that killing is the only thing Django is good at now. It’s a barren muddy wasteland Django, and such adversaries as Major Jackson and General Hugo Rodriguez, exist within and nobody comes out of it clean. Mud and bullets and blood and burning crosses stain the land as the body count goes up and up as the film progresses. Redemption and hope are rarely even suggested in the hearts of the characters.

Corbucci presents chaos with style. There are a number of fantastic shoot-outs and set-pieces all directed with vibrant energy; all zooms, whip-pans and rapid cross cutting. You want to immediately know what is in THAT coffin at the start. You WILL find out and revel in the mayhem which ensues. Indeed, Django (1966) is not for the faint-hearted. Of course, when watching it now, it is nowhere near as shocking as many contemporary films, however, at the time of release the British Board of Censors saw fit to ban Django (1966). It did not get an official release until 1993. That’s a shame as Bacalov’s score alone provides glorious support to the brutal visuals. Finally, Django (1966), Corbucci and Nero’s cult legacy was secured when Quentin Tarantino delivered the incredible, Django Unchained (2012), an altogether different, but equally violent and memorable Western classic.