Critics Are Raving: One Battle After Another Soars to a Stellar Rotten Tomatoes Score

Paul Thomas Anderson has a new movie coming next year, and early reactions are basically shouting: it rules. 'One Battle After Another' doesn’t open until September 26, 2025, but the first wave of reviews just hit and the love is loud.

Early buzz: big, loud, and glowing

The film launched on Rotten Tomatoes with a 97% score out of the gate. Not shocking given the ingredients: Anderson behind the camera, Leonardo DiCaprio up front, and a cast stacked with ringers. But the tone of the praise is notable — critics aren’t just calling it good, they’re calling it career-defining.

Variety’s Owen Gleiberman basically says Anderson has snapped back into pure master mode. The Hollywood Reporter’s Richard Lawson describes the film as both unnerving and energizing. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich goes even harder, labeling it a defining blockbuster for this century. And ComingSoon’s Jonathan Sim says the whole thing crackles — energy, wit, vision, the works.

The most swoony take comes from Rolling Stone’s David Fear, who drops this:

"Anderson's humanistic masterpiece of a movie says: You fight it with love. That's the end game. That's how you retain your decency and sanity. That's the only way you protect the future, and change it. That's how you live to battle another day."

Who’s in it and who made it

• Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio leads, with Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti, Benicio Del Toro, Wood Harris, and Alana Haim in the mix.
• Writer/director: Paul Thomas Anderson.
• Producers: Anderson, Adam Somner, and Sara Murphy.
• Executive producer: Will Weiske.
• Release date: September 26, 2025.

The Pynchon whisper

The movie is reportedly loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel 'Vineland.' If you know Pynchon, that’s a very specific flavor of chaos. The book is set in 1984 with an overtly Orwellian mood and follows Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie as they search for Prairie’s mom — a former 60s radical who vanished with a narc. And because it’s Pynchon, the world is packed with winking allegory, dangling plotlines on purpose, silly songs (yes, there’s one literally titled 'Floozy with an Uzi'), goofball movie spoofs (including a Pee-wee Herman bit called 'The Robert Musil Story'), and a fair amount of explicit detours — one of them riffing on a notorious sports car scene from 'V.'

How much of that lands in the actual film? The phrasing is 'somewhat inspired,' so don’t expect a straight adaptation — more like Anderson pulling threads from that universe and weaving his own thing.

Bottom line: if the current chorus holds, 'One Battle After Another' isn’t just PTA back on his game — it might be the one people argue about for a long time. We’ll see if that 97% has legs once the full crowd weighs in.