[Film Review] One Battle After Another

Grab your gas masks, secure your devices, and memorize your code words, because Paul Thomas Anderson, one of the greatest working auteurs, is lighting up cinemas with an explosive, tear gas-soaked stunner that spans generations.  

Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor lead a group of revolutionaries called the French. Some of their activities? Freeing detained immigrants. Setting off bombs. Robbing banks. Threatening politicians. But it’s no secret to them that being a revolutionary is a dangerous game, especially when a fetish-driven military officer (played by Sean Penn) is hellbent on thwarting their plans. 

From its opening minutes, the film ignites with the fury of a Molotov cocktail and maintains its propulsive energy and fist-raising power for the entire 162-minute duration. In a change of pace from some of Paul Thomas Anderson’s more deliberate films, this one is packed with exhilarating action, high-speed chase sequences, and violent combat. And even when the film takes moments to inhale and exhale, it’s never, ever boring. 

The excellent screenplay, which is loosely inspired by a Thomas Pynchon novel, comes locked and loaded with spirited dialogue, and the kinetic plot runs through a plethora of twists, turns, and tunnels (sometimes literally). It’s all so incredibly well-shot and impeccably staged. Paul Thomas Anderson instills each scene with a jittery sense of both paranoia and perspiration, and music choices along the way are just perfect. 

Leonardo DiCaprio is the pulse of the film and brings his A-game to a role that seems tailored just for him. He’s really, really funny here, especially amid his characters’ washed-up, stoner dad era. Every scene of him talking on the phone is comic gold. Teyana Taylor, despite having a very small amount of screen time, exudes a ferocity that practically cracks the glass of the cameras. Even when she’s not there, you still think about her. Benicio Del Toro, fresh off his exquisite performance in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, brings the cool as a wise “Sensei” fighting the good fight and giving secret sanctuary to immigrants. Sean Penn gives one of his best-ever performances. In fact, it’s disturbing how good it is. And newcomer Chase Infiniti makes an impressive big-screen debut. 

This isn’t Paul Thomas Anderson’s first political film per se, but it might be his most urgent and confrontational. It takes on authoritarianism. It takes on white supremacy. It takes on complacency. What makes the film feel so classic and so masterful is the fact that, no matter the decade of its release, it would still be relevant. At one point, following a significant time jump, a narrator says, “Not much has changed.” It’s why the revolution continues on. One battle after another. 

* 10/10 *

[Film Review] Weapons

Where, how, and why did a class of elementary school kids go missing? That’s the central question in Zach Cregger’s Weapons, an eerie and mysterious suburban horror tale that is cleverly and intriguingly told. 

It all happened at 2:17a.m. - a time stamp that may forever shake an unassuming town in Pennsylvania. A class of third-graders all ran from their homes and seemingly disappeared into the abyss. Scratch that. All but one disappeared. Weird, right?

The film is told from the perspectives of different characters as they overlap, cross paths, and eventually converge. There’s the teacher (Julia Garner), a cop trying to solve the case (Alden Ehrenreich), the principal (Benedict Wong), a grieving father (Josh Brolin), a local junkie (Austin Abrams), and the one student who remained (Cary Christopher). The decision to tell the story this way is an effective one, especially because it’s a device not often used in horror films. Not only does it let us into the intimate lives of these characters, but it also forces us to attempt to piece the story together on our own, like a cinematic puzzle.

I’ve seen a lot of people say that this film takes a page from Stephen King’s world, but I’d argue that it’s more M. Night Shyamalan in the way that it constantly sparks curiosity and grips tightly to its odd and deliberately baffling concept until the very end. We’re constantly asking, “What the hell is going on?”

There are a lot of creepy and disturbing moments here, but even amid all the darkness, the film manages to be wildly amusing and even comical at times. Josh Brolin delivers a “What the fuck?” line that is way funnier than it even should be. The real star is Amy Madigan, who plays an unhinged old lady with questionable motives and witch-like behaviors. It’s a batshit performance that joins Longlegs’ Nicolas Cage in the club of sadistic, powder-faced menaces.

In a film shrouded in ambiguity, it’s natural for us as an audience to seek meaning and attempt to make connections with neat allegories. In my view, this film is not purely just about one thing, but many things at once. It’s about how collective grief and trauma can sometimes create more chaos than community. It’s about the pervasiveness of substance use. It’s about how everything can be used as a weapon—our minds, our bodies, our vices, and yes - actual objects. Watching the film, it’s also hard not to think that it might allude to America’s all-too-common school shooting problem.

In Weapons, not everything comes to the surface. And sometimes we don’t get the full answers. But that might be the scariest thing of all. 

* 9/10 *