Best Pictures #127: 2025 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee: One Battle After Another

by A.J. 

Best Pictures #127: 2025 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee

One Battle After Another

“Do the revolution, baby. Go do it.”

At first glance One Battle After Another can seem like an intimidating film. Certain images and plot points seem like they have been ripped from the headlines and reflect current news coverage almost too strongly. The plot is serious but the main character is out of his depth to a comedic but frightening degree. There is also the lengthy runtime of 2hours 42 minutes. Yet, from the first shot to the last, master filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson has crafted a thoroughly engrossing and captivating one of a kind film. This is an action movie, a satire, a thriller, a family drama, a comedy, a chase movie. It received an impressive 13 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Director, and Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio, and is indeed a most Oscar worthy movie. 

The runtime is long but need not be intimidating. The first 30 minutes breeze by like the first 10 minutes of most other movies. This is all the more impressive since so much information is clearly and cleanly delivered without feeling rushed. This steady pace continues throughout the rest of the movie. The Best Editing nomination for Andy Jurgensen is certainly deserved. The shifts in tone may sound jarring–one scene will be serious and tense, another will be slapstick comedy–but they are never abrupt or take you out of the experience. No scene or character feels out of place because this was meant to be a strange movie. 

Plotwise and character-wise there is a lot to unpack, but nothing is ever hard to follow. From what I understand, Anderson’s screenplay is only loosely based on the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, about a group of Nixon-era radicals dealing with living in the Reagan-era. Anderson moves the story to a time resembling the present day, even when the story jumps forward 16 years; it’s worth noting that no specific year is ever given. In the world of this movie, the military seems to be the police or the police have been so militarized that there is no difference. The branch of the military that the villain, Col. Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, in one of his best performances), belongs to is never stated. He uses all the resources at his disposal, including unnecessary immigrant raids and inciting a riot, to pursue a personal vendetta against the main characters and secure a place in the secret right-wing white supremacist cabal that runs the country and calls themselves the Christmas Adventurers Club. They greet each other by saying “Hail Saint Nick.” Again, this movie is meant to be strange.

Lockjaw’s vendetta stems from his hate and desire for a member of the revolutionary group The French 75 named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Supporting Actress nominee Teyana Taylor in an extremely memorable but brief performance). After she disappears, Lockjaw then pursues her romantic partner, who now goes by Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and spends his days getting stoned and watching old movies, and Perfidia’s now teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), who thinks her dad’s talk about secret codes and surveillance is just paranoia. Lockjaw swoops in, Willa goes on the run, and Bob has to spring back into action, but the springs are 50 years old and very rusty.  

Leonardo DiCaprio is great at playing a dad, especially the type that thinks they are the “cool dad.” One of the funniest scenes of any movie from last year is Bob grilling Willa’s friends who stop by to take her to the school dance; the way he calls one of them “homie” is comedic gold. I think the one quick moment that best encapsulates his character is when he greets a group of Hispanics not with hello but with a very earnest, “Viva Zapata.” Maybe the biggest hurdle Bob faces is remembering the password to get the location of the rendezvous point from the annoying and obdurate revolutionary hotline operator.  His main ally, and in many ways the secret hero of the movie, is Sensei Sergio (Benicio Del Toro), whose unshakable calmness is a much needed counterpoint to Bob’s franticness and is very funny in its own way. 

For some viewers and critics this movie is too political, for others it is not political enough. There are no didactic scenes or speeches. Anderson’s screenplay makes no attempt to solve the issues and political situations that force the characters into their positions. Such an attempt would be reductive to the real world issues the movie mirrors and come across as foolish, no matter how sincere. The core of the story is a parent trying to protect their child. The main theme, which again is never stated, is that the good fight is never done. These are the things that will give One Battle After Another a lasting resonance beyond the current time.  

The look of the movie is absolutely fantastic with Oscar nominated cinematography by Michael Bauman. Two sequences in particular stand out. The first is the nighttime run across rooftops of Bob and a group of Hispanic teenagers as they are lit by fiery chaos below. The second is the climactic car chase over the sharp hills of a lonely stretch of desert road. This is one of the best photographed scenes of action in years (maybe only Top Gun: Maverick comes close in comparison). 

With Hard Eight and Punch Drunk Love being the (still superb) exceptions, Paul Thomas Anderson always finds a way to give his movies a sprawling epic feel. No matter the story or the setting, his films do not unfold the way you might expect. Also, no matter the story or setting, he finds humor in the most unlikely scenarios, which goes a long way to making his films approachable and entertaining. I’m not sure where I would rank One Battle After Another in Anderson’s filmography, but among the movies of 2025 it ranks at the top. 

One Battle After Another is available to stream on HBOmax.

Nominees: Adam Somner, Sara Murphy, Paul Thomas Anderson, producers Director: Paul Thomas Anderson Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti Production Companies: Warner Bros. Pictures, Ghoulardi Film Company Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures Release Date: September 26th, 2025 Total Nominations: 13, including Best Picture Other Nominations: Actor-Leonardo DiCaprio; Director-Paul Thomas Anderson; Supporting Actor-Benicio Del Toro; Supporting Actor-Sean Penn; Supporting Actress-Teyana Taylor; Adapted Screenplay-Paul Thomas Anderson; Cinematography-Michael Bauman; Production Design Florencia Martin (production designer), Anthony Carlino (set decorator); Editing-Andy Jurgensen; Original Score-Jonny Greenwood; Sound-José Antonio García, Christopher Scarabosio, Tony Villaflor; Casting-Cassandra Kulukundis

Best Pictures #82: 2021 (94th) Academy Award Best Picture Nominee: Licorice Pizza

by A.J 

Best Pictures #82: 2021 (94th) Academy Award Best Picture Nominee

Licorice Pizza

No matter the genre or subject matter, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, turns in films that are interesting, creative, challenging, and fascinating. They are the kind of movies that I hope to see every time I go to the theater or push play on a movie at home but are so rare that they feel like a treat. So much of Anderson’s Licorice Pizza feels like a living memory. Even as the sights and situations move from unlikely to bizarre, and back again, the story maintains believability because it stays grounded in its wonderfully charming main characters. Watching Licorice Pizza isn’t like watching someone else’s memory, it is being completely engrossed in the time and place and excitement the characters experience. 

Not unlike many films of the era in which Licorice Pizza is set, the early 1970’s, there is no discernible plot, but that is not to say it has no story or is aimless. What Licorice Pizza has instead of a traditional plot is great, charming leads with performances to match from Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman. Hoffman, son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, gives the most charismatic performance I’ve seen in years, matched only by co-star Alana Haim’s genuine movie star performance. Each does that rare and special movie magic trick of making their characters feel like real people. Their natural charisma, whether on screen together or separately, is the driving force and key to the whole movie. We follow these young people from experience to experience, scheme to scheme, as they navigate their way through 1973 Los Angeles. 

Hoffman plays Gary, a 15 year old actor who senses that his days as a child star are behind him and sets about on a series of business schemes (selling waterbeds, opening a pinball arcade). Haim plays Alana, a 25 year old working odd jobs who then gets caught up in Gary’s schemes. It is obvious that Gary has an unrequited crush on Alana, but his main appeal to her is as an unlikely mentor. It’s unlikely that Alana would’ve wanted to become an actress or become involved in a local L.A. political campaign if she had not met Gary first. After his first scene it is easy to see why other characters gravitate to him, go along with his plans and schemes, and why all the adults treat him like an old friend. Alana is more serious in her aspirations, though no less of a wanderer. She easily avoids the pitfalls of this kind of character: she’s never pretentious though she wants to do something important, never whiny though she doesn’t know what she wants. She is recognizable and relatable. We don’t know where she or Gary are going but we’re rooting for them and their futures. Neither Cooper Hoffman nor Alana Haim received Oscar nominations, yet they are entirely deserving of any and all praise and recognition for their performances.

Licorice Pizza is episodic but never feels disjointed or aimless. The episodes that stand out are the ones that involve Gary and Alana encountering the worst examples of adult males. From John Michael Higgins as the owner of Japanese restaurant who speaks English to his Japanese wife in a horribly racist accent (because he does not know Japanese) to Sean Penn as Jack Holden (a Williams Holden surrogate) who recreates a famous movie stunt and puts Alana in real danger to Bradley Cooper as real life hairdresser turned movie producer and husband of Barbara Streisand, Jon Peters. Cooper’s brief scenes are the most memorable and over the top sequence in the movie, simultaneously strange, hilarious, and frightening. Cooper is only so funny because he plays it so seriously; he wasn’t nominated by the Academy but Bradley Cooper deserves special recognition for his wild performance.

I suppose Licorice Pizza could be described as a “vibe” or “hangout” movie, meaning that if you like the vibe, if you want to just hangout with the characters no matter what happens, then you will enjoy the movie; if not, then you won’t. Recent examples of this kind of movie are the musical In the Heights and Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Of course this is not a new genre or approach. Two films Licorice Pizza reminded me of right away were Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused and George Lucas’s American Graffiti. These films, also light on plot, heavy on atmosphere, characters, and a sense of time and place are more than just the events that happen between the opening and closing credits. Youthful energy is recreated and released out to the audience. You experience what it is like to be these people at this time in this place searching for the next step, running blissfully in the glowing sunlight. 

Nominees: Sara Murphy, Adam Somner, Paul Thomas Anderson, producers

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn

Release Date: November 26th, 2021

Production Companies: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Focus Features, Bron Creative, Ghoulardi Film Company

Distributor: United Artists Releasing/Universal Pictures

Total Nominations: 3, including Best Picture

Win(s): N/A

Other Nominations: Director-Paul Thomas Anderson; Original Screenplay-Paul Thomas Anderson