American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis called out out the gushing critical response to Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie One Battle After Another, saying its fans have a serious leftist bias.
New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis celebrated this Leo DiCaprio-Sean Penn flick as “an exciting, goofy and deadly serious big-screen no — a no to complacency, to oppression, to tyranny.” (Italics hers.)
The “oppression” that makes this film so “timely” is deporting illegal migrants. DiCaprio’s bumbling Bob was in a “revolutionary” group. Wrote Dargis: “Early on, Bob eagerly follows her lead during the group’s attack on a migrant detention center where, under the cover of night, they and the other insurgents disarm the military guards and liberate a crowd of men, women and children.”
Let’s connect the dots. Deportation is racist. Armed resistance to deportations is “anti-racist.” Deportations are “tyranny.” Even if Americans voted for mass deportations. On his podcast, Ellis called out its politics, according to Variety:
It’s kind of shocking to see these kind of accolades for — I’m sorry, it’s not a very good movie — because of its political ideology, and it’s so obvious that’s what they’re responding to, why it’s considered a masterpiece, the greatest film of the decade, the greatest film ever made. Because it really aligns with this kind of leftist sensibility.
Ellis even predicted the move will eventually be dismissed as a “kind of musty relic of the post-Kamala Harris era — that thing everyone gathers around and pretends is so fantastic and so great when it really isn’t, just to make a point...There’s a liberal mustiness to this movie that already feels very dated by October 2025. Very dated. And it just doesn’t read the room. You know, it reads a tiny corner of the room, but it does not read what is going on in America.”
As for critics who hail the film as "important," Ellis protested: “No, it is not. It has really not read the room. It has not read the room at all about what’s going on in America.”
But that's often how Hollywood operates. The film will be celebrated for its "urgency" about the Trump "moment," and will probably get a pile of awards. Ellis is right: the evaluation of art often depends on whose side is served. In this case, though, the movie has earned more than $114 million at the box office. Often, the Oscar bait sells far fewer tickets.