Hacker Cinema
One Battle After Another
2025 · Film · 162 min
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Washed-up revolutionary Bob exists in a state of stoned paranoia, surviving off-grid with his spirited, self-reliant daughter, Willa. When his evil nemesis resurfaces after 16 years and she goes missing, the former radical scrambles to find her, father and daughter both battling the consequences of his past.
9 positive5 negative3 mixed4 neutralfrom 21 commenters
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22 comments on Hacker News
You picked a commercial movie to make your case? Why not Bugonia, The Odyssey, One Battle After Another, Project Hail Mary, Frankenstein, etc. (all recent)
> Big budget films today don't take risks
It's hard to argue Sinners wasn't taking risks, or One Battle After Another (not my favorite this year, but it was a wild ride). Even Marty Supreme was a very weird and strange film that was very high budget (the CGI was in the background, but there's a lot).
> The other is a movie that just based on its major theme would attract less then half the country and even in those remaining is a very polarizing movie. It's up for best picture because to preach, not because it's actually good.
I am not sure why you see "One Battle After Another" as preachy. It was ultimately a chase movie, perhaps you did not like the intent of the revolutionaries who kicked off the chase, but there was no lecturing as far as I could tell. All of the characters were flawed and broken. Moments where characters could do the "right thing" many ended up doing things out of self interest. The movie was deeply cynical and piercing critique on radicalism left and right.
The movie also has a metacritic score of 95, so you are objectively wrong.
Did you even see the movie?
Recent good movies, just going in release order off my letterboxd, although I have to be careful to include only "Hollywood" here:
- 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - beautifully shot and a beautiful theme about what humanity is
- One Battle After Another - it's PTA, all his movies are good
- Bugonia - incredible dark comedy
- Weapons - fun little horror comedy movie
- Sinners - just won an oscar for the soundtrack, not a perfect movie but a fun watch with some incredible scenes
- Companion
- Nosferatu - incredibly atmospheric
- The Surfer - total trip with good old Nicholas Cage
- Love Lies Bleeding - just a fun, a bit crazy movie
- Dream Scenario - another trippy Cage movie
- Poor Things
- Oppenheimer ...
- Renfield
- The Menu
- The Banshees of Insherin
- Barbarian (same director as Weapons)
- Prey
- Bullet Train - fun action movie
- The Northman
- The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
- The Invisible Man - most effective horror movie I've ever seen
- The Gentlemen
- Joker -how close can you get to looking like Taxi Driver without being Taxi Driver ...
- The Vast of Night - some scenes that really draw you in and pretty nostalgic
in 2019 now, so I won't continue, but there are plenty of good movies made nowadays, and I won't say I've seen even a close amount of them from the past few years. Of course I'm watching these at home, not in theatres, so that's certainly an argument.
I can’t agree with this statement because One Battle After Another is actually a movie about fatherhood and the lengths you go to to raise a child, and very explicitly makes fun of how many “fight the power” movements are often ineffective or devolve into making the problem you’re fighting against worse.
It’s a movie about family loyalties transcending and persisting through all else, which is a pretty universal message.
Previously posted to HN...
One Battle After Another Review by Mark Cira
https://letterboxd.com/markcira/film/one-battle-after-another/2/
This review is literate, historically aware, personal and very insightful; from the heart of a cinephile.
The obvious political stance of One Battle After Another notwithstanding, given how much the film succeeds as an exercise in using the language of cinema to tell a compelling story, it comes across (ironically) as idealogically motivated to say the movie isnt nominated in part for its merits with regard to craft and construction.
No doubt it appeals to people at the Academy in its persuasion, but if we were to strip it down to film technical aspects it would no doubt still be a frontrunner for film of the year.
If Sinners and One Battle After Another are up for movie of the year then it's no wonder no one is going. One is a fun but ultimately forgettable horror action movie. The other is a movie that just based on its major theme would attract less then half the country and even in those remaining is a very polarizing movie. It's up for best picture because to preach, not because it's actually good.
Paul Thomas Anderson's films oft set within extreme and/or marginal cultures. The porn industry in Boogie Nights. The Master was a thinly veiled alter ego of Scientology founder L.Ron Hubbard. One Battle after another looks at radical leftists. PTA likes to take characters that are hard to empathize with and humanize them. Also OBATA is a comedy, everybody but the daughter is a caricature.
The word "profound" is a bit overused when it comes to movies. I agree that The Battle of Algiers is an excellent film, one of the best ever made even. One Battle After Another is also excellent but it is not really political in the way the TBoA is. It uses a political setting very effectively in a chase thriller. A movie like The Parallax View is a better comparison. That movie used the post-60s paranoia very effectively in a great suspense thriller.
That's mistakenly conflating two concepts: the media propaganda in a more general sense of the word (like the pentagon reviewing movie scripts for war propaganda) and the underlying material and ideological reasons for US foreign policy (see natural resources, petrodollar, etc.). It would be a severe mistake to think the current conflict is somehow detached from the "grand chessboard" type of neoconservative thought dominating foreign policy for decades. In other words you shouldn't disagree with the war on Iran because Trump is an idiot, you should disagree because its an horrific atrocious war even if it were run by competent people instead.
Just as a very basic example: 4 presidents in a row have bombed Yemen: Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. This is consensus on very fundamental ideas on US foreign policy. But way more importantly than whether or not you agree with bombing Yemen, you should start to recognize that the real reasons for bombing Yemen or any other conflict are completely absent from public discourse and media.
Also once you broaden your horizon on film a bit it becomes very hard to watch modern mainstream western movies at all. Like watch The Battle of Algiers or any Costa-Gavras movie and you realize most western cinema is at best just infantilizing and at worst outright propaganda.
Like if you watched One Battle After Another and thought it was profound, did you not notice the absence of any real ideological exploration beyond "racism is bad"? What did the caricatured resistance really believe in? What can such a movie really say about "radical" politics on immigration if the liberals who made it have to account for liberals approval and funding of ICE? Like it said nothing at all, that's the issue with everything. We are so politically atrophied that we think its the most political movie ever, but its really apolitical if you think about it a bit more.
The author framed this as if "One Battle After Another" was some adult work and they couldn't watch "Predator" afterwards because it was so childish.
I had the opposite reaction and could barely make it through 15m of One Battle. The movie opens with women in skin tight dresses and mini skirts with automatic weapons robbing banks and breaking into migrant detention centers while yelling "this is what real power looks like". That feels like childish nonsense to me but then it is wrapped in this "radical chic" that is supposed to force me to take it seriously. Rather than movies like Predator which are intentionally dumb and fun the author should look at how vague political messages and sex are used to take extremely shallow work and make it "adult".
No need to do a drive by on Predator Badlands like that, it's a perfectly enjoyable film in its own right. I agree with the author though, there's nothing nearly as emotionally deep or socio-politically engaging as One Battle After Another, and so it would make for poor choice as a double feature to run second in the pairing.
Apparently thinking One Battle After Another (2025) is "without a doubt THE most insufferable movie of the year" (<https://singlemindedmovieblog.blogspot.com/2026/01/bottom-10-of-2025.html>)
Every single Hollywood movie has authoritarian apologia, you don't have to go to Christopher Nolan or Forrest Gump. The most recent example is One battle after another.
"Wait, There’s Torture in Zootopia?" DOI:10.1017/S1537592719005012
One Battle After Another - skip everything in the earlier timeline at the beginning of the movie. Nothing is lost. It might even be better, because what exactly is happening is a bit of a mystery but you still get all the info you need in the end.
Movies are just as bad with the editing. They're way too fucking long.
Wake up dead man? I feel like 30-45m could be cut and it'd be good. Why is One Battle after another almost 3 hours?
Is there a competition to try to beat the notoriously long Lord of the Rings Extended edition in runtime?
> Conservatives Take Aim at ‘One Battle After Another’: “Year’s Most Irresponsible Movie”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/one-battle-after-another-conservative-reactions-1236394128/
> Netflix's 93% RT Hit Show That Has the U.S. Government Furious Is a Streaming Sensation
https://collider.com/netflix-boots-streaming-success-after-government-backlash-october-2025/
And that’s before we’ve even touched HBO. John Oliver is probably the most obvious example. But I’d say shows like Watchmen count too. Fahrenheit 451. Succession was pretty clearly mocking FOX News and its media ecosystem.
Art that’s critical of the government doesn’t literally have to be shouting “Trump bad”, it can be done through critique or mocking of the values it holds.
A few recent Warner Bros films / coproductions
Imagine if these had not had theatrical releases, or, had only had 1 week limited releases just to qualify for awards..
Tenet
Dune
The Batman
Barbie
Furiosa
Twisters
Minecraft
Sinners
Superman
Weapons
One Battle After Another
The 90s films mentioned in this post are works of art and the actors and creators were artists. Compensation sustains the art, but it’s not the primary purpose.
Netflix is a business. The content on Netflix is largely designed or purchased with a primary goal of engaging paying users.
We can find plenty of films that are works of art after the 90s. One Battle After Another is a recent one that comes to mind. Parasite, No Country for Old Men, Arrival, Moonlight, Tree of Life, Midsommar, Mandy…
Reviews are very hit or miss nowadays (mostly miss for me), but the verdict for One Battle After Another is absolutely correct.
For those of you who are on the fence wrt watching this movie, the politics and the revolutionaries simply form the backdrop for the story. The movie is ultimately a chase-thriller and the cinematic pleasure on screen is just incredible. If you are a fan of superbly shot and staged set-pieces, this movie is for you.
Apparently the new Paul Thomas Anderson film "One Battle After Another" is inspired by Vineland after the director adapted Inherent Vice previously.