Few ironies exist in Hollywood culture like the experiences of prestige films that open weekend to discover that moviegoers have vastly misunderstood the product they are seeing. Paul Thomas Anderson's latest epic, One Battle After Another (2025), has experienced something few films achieve today: widespread critical acclaim — it's as richly ambitious and vital as any movie this year, angry, witty, and brimming with technical wizardry—while failing to find a wide audience who either didn't come out to see it, or weren't quite sure what it was they were coming to see.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
Anderson stages his story like a long fuse burning toward an explosion that is emotional as much as political. The film follows Bob, a washed-up former revolutionary (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) who exists in a haze of stoned paranoia and old ideals gone sour—until the reappearance of a long-dormant enemy forces him and his scattered comrades back into motion. The premise has the bones of a thriller—danger resurfaces, the past refuses to stay buried—but Anderson refuses to deliver a neat genre product. He gives you instead a messy, talky, bruisingly contemporary American fever dream, filled with shifting alliances, ideological hangovers, and the weary recognition that “the revolution” rarely ends cleanly; it simply changes costume.
The cast is one of the film’s undeniable strengths, and it’s here that your own response aligns beautifully with the consensus among critics: Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti are electric. Taylor has the kind of screen authority that makes you lean forward—smart, sharp, wounded, and unsentimental—and Infiniti, as the daughter whose jeopardy becomes the film’s emotional spine, brings a grounded intensity that keeps the chaos tethered to something human.
Then there is Sean Penn and what great actors can do when they want to disappear: disappear into someone else. It's not acting -- it's a profession. Penn possesses an ugly, suggestive danger. You don't hear it coming, it clicks shut.
Visually and otherwise, Anderson in many ways challenges you to keep up. When the movie is at its busiest—crowded with dialogue and politics and tipping from silliness toward menace—you know exactly who's driving. Images jump out at you. Driving through deserted highways and fields toward the film's conclusion comes with an uneasy majesty—America as both setting and puzzle, majestic and uncaring. Anderson lets the landscape speak for itself, tapping into something quietly grand. That sequence, above all, feels like Anderson slipping into overdrive, channeling landscape into feeling.
So why didn't moviegoers love it like the critics?
Part of the answer may be brutally simple economics. Trade reporting and awards analysts pointed to the film’s enormous cost (widely discussed in the $130M+ range) and the reality that a film priced like a blockbuster needs blockbuster attendance to look healthy on paper. Yet One Battle After Another is, in crucial ways, not “a crowd movie” in the modern sense: it’s long (about 162 minutes by several critical write-ups), dialogue-forward, politically loaded, and resistant to easy categorization. A casual audience primed for a clean genre ride may have found something else entirely: an Anderson film that uses thriller engines but refuses thriller simplifications.
Marketing probably didn’t help matters, either. When a campaign can’t quite figure out how to articulate what a movie is, the marketing tends to sell a feeling, an attitude, a star — and audiences infer whatever they will. If folks walked into this expecting a traditional action picture, Anderson’s staccato rhythms and dialogue-driven showdowns might play like false advertising — even when the craft work is stupendous. Some of the most fascinating audience feedback I’ve read (particularly in user-review forums) has fixated on this very issue: that they felt the movie was sold to them as something it’s not.
And yet the “audience failure” story is more complicated than the headline implies. The film’s critical reception is, by measurable standards, near-unanimous—a Metacritic score in the mid-90s places it among the year’s most acclaimed works. Meanwhile, the audience response isn’t simple rejection so much as division: some viewers adore it, some feel alienated by its density and tonal shifts, and the online rating averages reflect that complicated middle. What’s especially striking is that exit polling reported by box-office analysts painted a warmer in-theater picture—strong CinemaScore and positive PostTrak indicators—suggesting that those who did show up often liked it; the struggle was getting the broader public to show up in the first place.
Now comes the awards-season twist—because whatever the box office did or didn’t do, the Academy clearly listened. One Battle After Another emerged as one of the morning’s major players with 13 Oscar nominations, second only to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which led with a record-breaking 16. And here your question lands like a perfectly timed cut: if awards “momentum” is a living thing, can a film’s narrative shift when another contender becomes the headline? It can. It often does. Oscar races aren’t only about merit—they’re about consensus, heat, timing, and the stories voters tell themselves about what they’re rewarding. A nomination haul that large keeps Anderson’s film squarely in the conversation, but Sinners’ historic showing inevitably changes the oxygen in the room.
If One Battle After Another ultimately wins Best Picture, it will likely be because voters see it as the year’s most fully realized piece of filmmaking—ambitious, crafted to the last frame, and unmistakably authored. If it loses, it won’t be because it lacked artistry; it will be because Oscar seasons, like revolutions, have their own internal politics.
For readers who missed it in theaters—or who want to revisit it outside the noise of expectation—One Battle After Another is now available to stream on Max (HBO Max), where it may find the audience that eluded it in multiplexes: viewers willing to settle into its length, listen closely to its argument, and let its strange, bruised humor do its work.
In the end, the most telling thing about One Battle After Another may be this: it’s a film that refuses to behave. It won’t simplify itself to please the marketplace, and it won’t shrink itself to fit the marketing box it was sold in. Critics crowned it. Many viewers shrugged. The Academy saluted it loudly. And somewhere in that triangle—between art, commerce, and legacy—Paul Thomas Anderson is doing what he has always done: making the movie anyway.
Editor’s Note:
Watching One Battle After Another, I was struck by how unapologetically it demands patience and engagement at a moment when so much mainstream cinema is engineered to be instantly consumable. This is a film that asks you to lean in, to listen, and to wrestle with its ideas rather than be carried along by them. Whether that makes it alienating or exhilarating may depend on the viewer—but for me, its refusal to simplify felt like a deliberate, and admirable, act of defiance.
Did One Battle After Another challenge you, frustrate you, or fully win you over—and do you think the Academy tends to reward ambition like this, even when audiences don’t? Please comment... rate... and share...
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