From “Boogie Nights” (1998) to “There Will Be Blood” (2007) and beyond, Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) has consistently refused to do the predictable thing, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. Yet even by his standards, “One Battle After Another” is an “electrifyingly improbable” proposition – a funny, “Dr. Strangelove”-style political satire cum action thriller, which “features not one, but two of the best car chases in years”.
Set in an alternative America in which migrants are being herded into concentration camps, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob, a washed-up, long-retired left-wing militant and explosives expert. He is surviving off grid with his 16-year-old daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) when his old nemesis – a white supremacist army colonel named Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) – rematerialises to settle a score and advance his “crazed” new political agenda.
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Yet the film – which starts with a dazzling prologue in which we meet Bob in his insurgent heyday, when he is pursuing a relationship with a notorious fellow radical (Teyana Taylor) – is one of PTA’s more melancholic works, a study of characters who’ve seen their idealism fade away and, in the years since their revolutionary actions, the return of a dismal status quo.
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Heavenly spectacle in the wilds of Canada
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Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secretsfeature Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, through Feb. 22
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