Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest work, One Battle After Another, is a triumphant and ostentatious spectacle about morally repugnant monsters. “The message is clear,” declares one of its pseudo-protagonists in the opening scene, “free borders and free bodies.”

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Bob Ferguson, a burnt-out radical whose paranoia and half-functioning memory cells are all that remain from his revolutionary heyday. Alongside his girlfriend, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), he belongs to the French 75, a Weather Underground–style militant group obsessed with open- border utopianism. Take what you will from the fact that nowhere in Anderson’s screenplay are they referred to as “terrorists”; instead, the film offers such coy euphemisms as “revolutionaries.”

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