Top films of 2025 in the UK: No. 1 – Battle by Battle | culture

pThomas Anderson’s countercultural drama Battle After Battle, based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, is a formal mystery that confounded, intrigued, and bewildered, and ends the year without a final consensus on its precise meaning. One rare dissenter is screenwriter and filmmaker Paul Schrader, who laconically commented online: “The filmmaking is A+, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t muster an ounce of sympathy for Leo DiCaprio or Sean Penn. I kept waiting for them to die.”

But that’s why the film is so compelling: there’s really no sympathy for the two unlikable main men, and their deaths and frailties have a kind of relaxing, entropic energy. They are heading towards disaster. And yes, the filmmaking is A+ or A++; She is full of fun because of her boldness and experience. It’s filmmaking with the elegance of late Kubrick and knowing theatricality, culminating in an exhilarating but also bizarre car chase down a undulating highway. This isn’t the same as style without substance, but it’s certainly a film that can’t help but tout its self-conscious style to equal its status with its subject: the petty tyrant America of the present and the future, and those who would grow up to resist it from within.

The question that cannot be completely answered is when and where it is supposed to be set. United States 10 or 20 years ago? Or an imagined version of the alternate reality of present-day America; America is a strange world? This cavalier step away from a recognizable contemporary world is partly a function of adapting Pynchon, with his playful, cartoonish imagination, as well as updating his novel, which was supposed to be set in the present in the Reagan-era 1980s, with flashbacks to the apocalyptic 1960s. The story is now moved forward to sometime between the Obama and Trump years — or diagonally into new narrative territory. The title envisions the endless crises and eternal culture war of modern life.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Bob, a former revolutionary who was once part of an activist cell raiding immigrant prisons on the Mexican border. He has aged mercilessly into a grumpy, drunk, disheveled loser. His partner in his glory days was Perfidia, played by the radiantly charismatic Teyana Taylor. Perfidia successfully seduces the swaggering man in charge of counterinsurgency intelligence, Colonel Stephen Lockjaw, played with reptilian fanaticism by Sean Penn.

Lockjaw’s infatuation with her, in which elemental lust merges with poignantly abject ecstasy, is something Perfidia attempts to manipulate to control the military opposition. But things go horribly wrong, as she becomes pregnant, and her daughter Willa, played by Chase Infinity, has a paternity crisis in the film. Who is the real father of America: reactionary or radical?

DiCaprio, Penn, Taylor and Infiniti are all absolutely fantastic and Jonny Greenwood’s score is fantastic. “Battle After Battle” is a protest song for a film whose lyrics revolve around cruelty, tyranny, and the heroism of dissent.