Stream it or skip it?

I actively resisted at first Battle after battle (It’s now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video): The story of angry leftists who violently oppose a militarized anti-immigration group that is not ICE, but is essentially still ICE, and which sows fear and chaos, abuses power, and organizes riots in the streets? Aren’t our nerves frayed enough, given the state of our current American reality? But my defenses crumbled when I realized that director Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t interested in simplistic political vignettes or button-pushing per se. Adaptation, very loose, Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland – Inspired by the antics of Nixon-era hardline Marxists The Weather Underground – Anderson creates a somewhat heightened reality to this story of cultural and ideological upheaval, grounded in a fraught, but always loving, relationship between father and daughter, and the film is at once a nerve-wracking thriller, a powerful comedy and an exhilarating thriller. He is Battle after battle The definitive film of our time? Maybe so.

Essence: Ghetto Bat (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the French explosives expert 75. Yes, Ghetto Bat. The people in this movie have names like that. His girlfriend is Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), and their adversary is Captain Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). See what I mean? Now how seriously can we take it when Pat, Perfidia, and a crew of heavily armed extremists take over an immigration detention center near the Mexico border to release detainees, humiliating Superintendent Lockjaw in the process? These are the names of the picture books. They’re not comedic situations, but parts of this film are light-hearted enough in their seriousness to remind us that we don’t feel the same relentless nausea. Alex Garland is annoyingly potential Civil war; The film is also serious enough in its unseriousness to separate it from a nihilistic “comedy.” Ari Aster Eddington.

anyway. While the French 75 cause blackouts with bombs and rob banks to fund their cause, love blossoms between Pat and Perfidia. Lockjaw keeps Perfidia, specifically his male eye, on her butt, leading to a compromise: a tryst in a hotel room in exchange for Lockjaw not forcing his comrades on a French 75. That moment is immediately followed by a shot of Perfidia firing a machine gun at a range, the butt of the weapon ricocheting alongside her heavily pregnant belly. She gives birth to a girl. Pat wants to settle down and raise her. Perfidia isn’t so sure. Lockjaw is moving on French Route 75. It’s cracking up. Perfidia is captured and bargains her way to witness protection by exposing the French 75, Pat and the kid escape and 16 years pass and Pat is now Bob Ferguson and the girl is Willa (Chase Infiniti) and they are living off the grid in Bucktan Cross, California. Lockjaw is now Colonel Lockjaw and is looking for a place in a secret society of white men who don’t like non-white people. Lockjaw’s group is still active, looking for Bob – we’ll call him Bob now, it’s Bob – and Willa. For reasons. The reasons are not given but the visual language of the film is clearly communicated.

Bob is a mess. His brain. His poor brain, fried and overworked by drugs, lethargy and paranoia. Willa is strong and somewhat adequate, and one of the prides of Sensei Sergio’s (Benicio del Toro) Ninja Academy — yes, the Ninja Academy — but on the surface she’s a typical teenager. She chews her father’s ass out for drinking too much and driving home—“But I know how to drink and drive, honey,”—and then goes to the school dance with her friends. That’s when Lockjaw strikes. However, he doesn’t have a drop on Willa; They’re found by 75-bit French extremist Deandra (Regina Hall), and they zoom into the desert to hide out with the Sisters of the Brave Beaver, the last funny name I’ll reveal. He promises.

Meanwhile, Bob has to drop everything except the antique, untraceable cell phone given to him by French 75 and run, in a dirty bathrobe, to coach Sergio, who calmly helps us through panicked exhaustion. Sensei Sergio, who provides an electrical outlet for Bob’s gol’s cursed, uncharged phone that he needs to use to contact the French 75 stronghold that asks him for the passwords that the narcotics have long ago killed and left to die in Bob’s melting hippocampus; All Bob wants is a rendezvous point so he can reunite with Willa, his parental protective instincts going into overdrive but struggling to find his place among all the dead brain cells. Sensei Sergio, who sees Lockjaw forces converging on Pactan Cross for a crackdown, must therefore be concerned with the “Latin Harriet Tubman situation” he oversees. Things get crazier from here, for all parties involved. But amidst the chaos and constant movement, Sensei Sergio and Bob still managed to drink a few small beers. There’s no bad time to A few small beers.

What movies will it remind you of? Weapons. Two provocative films from 2025 have adamantly refused to be easily pigeonholed; It provided a tonal stew that was unstable but absorbing; It inspired huge laughs underscored by the exciting dynamic ideas. And those movies are Weapons and Battle after battle.

Performance worth watching: This film features one standout performance after every previous standout performance. DiCaprio plays another bumbling extraordinaire, and Ben is a rigid, limp, undersized, hard-headed, utterly obnoxious hypocrite. Both are wonderfully satirical descriptions brimming with unexpected depth. Taylor burns everything in her path with her lust for work of all kinds. Hall is an underutilized grounding force. But the important characters here are del Toro, a walking, talking man with a raised eyebrow and a wonderful comedic wit, and Infinity, who carries the film’s emotional weight with consistent intensity.

Sex and skin: Some aggressive, but mostly implied, off-screen/offscreen action.

Take us: Battle after battle An American film to the core, Anderson creates a refreshing, funny, disturbing, disorienting and utterly imperfect masterpiece to bring to life. This damned country. Set in the present, the future, and also the past, the film offers a glimpse that is metaphorical but also imaginative but also realistic. This damned country Yesterday, today and tomorrow. I’m talking in circles because there may be lulls and peaks in intensity, but the battles will continue as they did in the 1860s, 1860s and 2020s. Good guys do bad things and bad guys do bad things, and the confused and inflamed majority caught in between tend to be like Bob Ferguson who smokes cigarettes, watches old movies and never leaves the house, crippling and sabotaging himself and sabotaging his cultural masculinity, hoping – key word: hope – that the children they produce have enough intelligence to make the world a better place, because we have clearly failed.

One of the many threads in this crazy film traces Willa’s coming of age as the daughter of revolutionaries, and the dynamic she becomes involved in with her increasingly hollow father. The film sparked a deep conversation between me and a friend half my age about the generation gap, and how stark the contrast between youth and old age is in an age of division and turmoil. It is likely that Anderson envisioned the basic relationship between Battle after battle In response to him being a father of mixed-race children (he’s been married to Maya Rudolph since 2001), but the broader theme addresses how Generation Life itself is for the young, because the weary old often escape from it before they stop breathing. But hope remains.

That’s every big thing Anderson throws into this film, and he knows full well that it’s too big and unwieldy to contain at all, even at 161 minutes. Some will see it as inherently political and be disappointed by it, while others will be agitated or angered by its veracity or lack thereof. It’s practically broken glass; You see fragments that reflect your political, social, and personal ideologies. On a whole other level, it’s an exhilarating, propulsive action film with set pieces that nudge Anderson in the general direction of crowd-pleasing; A steady camera roll through Sensei Sergio’s close-knit community anchors our view of Bob’s bewilderment, and the climatic car chase down a steep desert highway will tug at your hair, all while Jonny Greenwood’s moody, nervous score keeps you on edge. Battle after battle Explosive like things, movies, life, all things, everything.

Our call: Once again: a completely incomplete masterpiece. Broadcast it.

John Serpa is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.