Prescient and political, 'One Battle After Another' is one of the year's best films

"Paul Thomas Anderson is one of Hollywood's great time travelers. He took us to turn-of-the-century oil country in There Will Be Blood, the 1950s London fashion world in Phantom Thread, and the '70s San Fernando Valley, twice, in Boogie Nights and Licorice Pizza. One Battle After Another is Anderson's first film in ages set in the present day, and partly for that reason, it grabs you and even smacks you in the face in a way that his other movies haven't."

"It's a prescient, mesmerizing, frequently hilarious and fearlessly political piece of work. It's also an action thriller staged on an epic canvas, with harrowing gunfights, daring rooftop escapes and poundingly visceral car chases, including one, staged on a rolling desert highway, that must be seen to be believed. The exact time frame isn't specified, but from the opening sequence in which a band of revolutionaries rescue immigrants from a detention center near the U.S.-Mexico border it's clear that the moment is ours."

"Leonardo DiCaprio plays Pat, an explosives expert; a searing Teyana Taylor plays his lover, Perfidia Beverly Hills, who's fiercely dedicated to the group's radical principles. The film's first half-hour catches us up in the heat and momentum of their reckless romance, and also in the tension and danger of their work, as they plant bombs in courthouses and in the offices of politicians who oppose abortion."

One Battle After Another is set in the present and opens with revolutionaries called the French 75 rescuing immigrants from a detention center near the U.S.-Mexico border. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Pat, an explosives expert, and Teyana Taylor plays his lover, Perfidia Beverly Hills, dedicated to radical principles. The group plants bombs in courthouses and politicians' offices, provoking a violent cat-and-mouse with Sean Penn's Army colonel Steven J. Lockjaw. Betrayal and disaster scatter the French 75; Perfidia disappears, many members are killed or captured, and Pat goes into hiding with their infant daughter. Sixteen years later Pat, as Bob Ferguson, hides in Baktan Cross.

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