Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film One Battle After Another is as political as a film can be (especially for PTA), early on it concerns itself with a couple within a far-left revolutionary group calling themselves the ‘French-75’. The start reminded me heavily of How To Blow Up a Pipeline (Goldhaber, 2022) in how it positioned the audience within the guerrilla movement that only had their perspective to follow. Both films share a youthful exuberance, wanting to create change to world where facism is intrinsically ingrained in society.

Like a lot of PTA films, the genre the film starts in usually gets turned on its head. Here is another example of this where the film becomes more of a mainstream blockbuster the further the story goes on. This isn’t to put the film down by saying that a revolutionary film turns into a mainstream thriller. The reason it does this is to follow the life changes that happen to the main character in Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio). After the capturing of his girlfriend (Teyana Taylor) he has to flee in exile with his daughter (Chase Infiniti). This is where to becomes a cat and mouse chase thriller with him and the authorities. The film doesn’t become a thriller because it necessarily wants to be, it heads in this directions because of the outcome to the main character. In many ways it’s cinema without boundaries, a film shouldn’t be defined by just one genre because life doesn’t always work out that way and this is the prime example of that.