One Battle After Another is top-tier Paul Thomas Anderson — not as good as There Will Be Blood or Phantom Thread but so much better than the average movie that it seems to belong in a different medium entirely. It sprawls across genres and tones and defiantly refuses to anchor itself to a single character. Leonardo DiCaprio is its biggest star, playing a formerly radical explosives expert named Bob Ferguson who goes into hiding with his daughter in a small California town; his character provides the connective tissue between the giddy revolutionary action of the opening act to the hungover consequences of the next. But so much of the movie is about what happens around or despite Bob, a burnout with a brain so cooked by all the substances he’s spent the past decade and a half ingesting

See Full Page