The revolution is sexy, until it’s not.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s tenth feature, One Battle After Another, finds the director working in what might be his most thematically of-the-moment mode yet, an electric thriller set against the backdrop of political resistance and the resurgence of unbridled white supremacy. At its most basic, it’s standard action movie stuff: Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, an ex-revolutionary searching for his missing daughter. But it’s also about the unfulfilled promises of protest and rebellion, and what can happen to a movement deferred. As the brazen Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a leader of the militant activist group French 75 and Bob’s partner in crime and romance, aptly notes, “Every revolution begins fighting demons,” but then they “just end up fighting themselves.”.

The setting is vaguely contemporary — other than the background placement of a pop song or two from the 2010s, I didn’t spy any markers to suggest a specific year. The French 75 are raging against the machine, and in the film’s exciting opening act, the group smuggles migrants out of a detention center; they have no qualms with setting fire to government buildings and robbing banks. That last demonstration turns deadly and marks the beginning of the end of the French 75 as they know it. Members are arrested, killed or forced to go underground.

Some 16 years later, Bob is living quietly with Willa (Chase Infiniti), his daughter with Perfidia; Perfidia hasn’t been in the picture since the bank robbery fallout, when Willa was an infant. Bob, no longer the idealistic radical he once was — or at least imagined himself to be — is now a paranoid stoner who keeps close tabs on teenage Willa and does little else besides watch old movies on TV. But his past comes back to haunt him in the form of the old foe responsible for the dissolution of the French 75 — the racist, xenophobic and corrupt Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, played by a very colorful and sinister Sean Penn. –NPR

“… it’s an easy best picture Oscar nomination in the bag.”-The Times UK