LE MONDE'S OPINION − MUST-SEE

Audiences have been waiting a long time for a great American film that would finally meet the moment and be in tune with a reality that seems almost impossible to capture on screen, so often does it outpace fiction itself. With his previous film, Licorice Pizza (2021), Paul Thomas Anderson appeared to retreat into the golden legend of the 1970s and youthful tenderness. But with One Battle After Another, Anderson forges an extraordinary connection with current events by reviving a theme rarely embraced by Hollywood glamor: radical left-wing activism, which has recently resurged on the political stage. It is across this political backwash of countercultural forms that the 1970s resurface again, with the film confirming their haunting presence at the heart of the present, as if superimposed onto today's reality.

A prodigy who emerged on the scene of late-1990s mannerist cinema as a kind of reincarnation of Robert Altman (1925-2006), Anderson (There Will Be Blood, 2007; Phantom Thread, 2017) has, over 30 years and 10 films, become one of the few filmmakers to uphold the formal and narrative complexity inherited from New Hollywood. Written, produced and directed by Anderson himself, One Battle After Another continues, as with Inherent Vice (2014), the director's ongoing partnership with the work of Thomas Pynchon. Here, Anderson has loosely adapted Vineland (1990), transforming it into a wild and sprawling odyssey characteristic of the novelist.

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