Best films of 2025 in the UK: No 1 – One Battle After Another

Leonardo DiCaprio is a former revolutionary searching for his daughter in Paul Thomas Anderson’s exhilaratingly audacious counterculture epic

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aul Thomas Anderson’s countercultural drama-thriller One Battle After Another, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, is a formal enigma that has perplexed, provoked and entranced, and the year ends with no definitive consensus as to its exact meaning. A rare naysayer is screenwriter and film-maker Paul Schrader, who commented tersely online: “Film-making at level A+, but try as I might I couldn’t muster up an ounce of empathy for Leo DiCaprio or Sean Penn. I kept waiting for them to die.”