The presumptive frontrunner for next year’s Academy Award for Best Picture — and undoubtedly one of the best movies of 2025 regardless of how many Oscars it wins — will be on streaming in a matter of days.
HBO Max announced today that Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another will begin streaming on the service later this week.
The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson, a former revolutionary turned paranoid single father to a young woman named Willa (Chase Infiniti). Years earlier, DiCaprio’s lover and Willa’s mother Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyona Taylor) was arrested by a maniacal military man (Sean Penn), turned informant on her former allies, and then escaped to Mexico.
Decades later, Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw resumes his quest for Bob and Willa, while Bob tries to shake off a decades-long drug-addled stupor to protect his beloved daughter. Fleeing from the law, Bob relies on the help of Willa’s martial arts instructor “Sensei” Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro). And Lockjaw himself gets support from a secretive network of white supremacists called the Christmas Adventurers, whose members take their own interest in Lockjaw, Bob, and Willa’s shared past.
One Battle After Another”/>Warner Bros.
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With incredible performances, wild car chases, and visceral 70mm cinematography, One Battle After Another has already picked up a slew of critics awards. It’s also already been named the top film of 2025 by this very website, whose esteemed critic wrote…
One Battle After Another is a true unicorn in Hollywood’s IP era: A bold, expensive epic (it reportedly cost upwards of $150 million) with a strong directorial point of view and heavy political subtext. It’s also impossible to pin it down in any one genre; writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson combines a paranoid thriller, a stoner adventure, and an issues movie of the sort that used to be the Hollywood studios’ bread and butter, then blends them all with a genuinely moving tale about an aging single dad trying to protect his teenage daughter from his own past mistakes and a world falling apart. It’s a hilarious, beautiful, strange, disturbing, and exciting film. In other words: A new PTA classic.
One Battle After Another premieres on HBO Max on December 19.
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