Leonardo DiCaprio’s most recent film performance is wowing the critics ahead of its release this Friday. Critics Peter Bradshaw and Robbie Collin, among others, have awarded One Battle After Another with outstanding five-star reviews.
One Battle After Another is an action thriller film written, produced, and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. It is loosely based on the 1990 novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. Alongside DiCaprio, the film stars Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and Chase Infiniti in her film debut.
The film’s synopsis reads: “Bob is a washed-up revolutionary who lives in a state of stoned paranoia, surviving off-grid with his spirited and self-reliant daughter, Willa. When his evil nemesis resurfaces and Willa goes missing, the former radical scrambles to find her as both father and daughter battle the consequences of their pasts.”
Bradshaw, of the Guardian, said in his review: “One Battle After Another is at once serious and unserious, exciting and baffling, a tonal fusion sending that crazy fizz across the VistaVision screen – an acquired taste, yes, but addictive. The title itself hints at an unending culture war presented as a crazily extreme action movie with superbly managed car chases and a final, dreamlike and hypnotic succession of three cars through the undulating hills. And is the central paternity crisis triangle an image for an ownership dispute around the American melting-pot dream?”
Elsewhere, Collin stated in the Telegraph: “DiCaprio also astounds – frazzled and absurd yet also sweet and even noble, he evokes Jack Nicholson in his prime. (Update your Best Lead and Supporting Actor Oscar predictions now.)
“There’s something deeply 1970s Hollywood, too, about the level of confidence Anderson has in his audience. For more than two-and-a-half hours, he trusts us to cling on all the way up to the climactic pursuit, set on a bumpy stretch of desert road, with shots to make your stomach levitate. It’s a roller-coaster ending to a film that has you disembarking shaky and elated, and ready to stagger right back into the queue.”
Clarisse Loughrey of the Independent also awarded the film five stars, she said: “This is, in short, Anderson’s action epic. It opens with the blistering, capital “C” Cinema image of Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, magnificent in every scene she inhabits) as she struts into an immigration detention centre –righteous fury in her muscles, looking like she stands about 12 feet tall –declaring to a humiliated Colonel Steven J Lockjaw (Sean Penn), “this is an announcement of a motherf***ing revolution”.”
One Battle After Another is available in UK cinemas from September 26.
