Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another has been the talk of the town since its wide release last month—from critics to filmmakers to audiences, the reception has been nothing short of euphoric. Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, the film opens in an unspecified present, detailing the activities of a militant group led by a Black revolutionary (played by Teyana Taylor). Years after her disappearance, her partner (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their daughter (newcomer Chase Infiniti) are hunted down by an old enemy, Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw. The chase takes them across California, with an assortment of other characters becoming embroiled along the way.
The movie is an unabashedly fun, feel-good action flick—one that also calls back to films as disparate as The Searchers, Commando, and Running on Empty. But is it among the greatest of the decade, as some have claimed? Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited critics and programmers Miriam Bale and Adam Piron on the Podcast to discuss the film’s successes and failures, how it fits into PTA’s larger body of work, and its engagement with American history and the present. If there’s one thing the four agreed on, it’s that One Battle After Another is indeed a “very rich text.”
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Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another has been the talk of the town since its wide release last month—from critics to filmmakers to audiences, the reception has been nothing short of euphoric. Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, the film opens in an unspecified present, detailing the activities of a militant group led by a Black revolutionary (played by Teyana Taylor). Years after her disappearance, her partner (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their daughter (newcomer Chase Infiniti) are hunted down by an old enemy, Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw. The chase takes them across California, with an assortment of other characters becoming embroiled along the way.
The movie is an unabashedly fun, feel-good action flick—one that also calls back to films as disparate as The Searchers, Commando, and Running on Empty. But is it among the greatest of the decade, as some have claimed? Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited critics and programmers Miriam Bale and Adam Piron on the Podcast to discuss the film’s successes and failures, how it fits into PTA’s larger body of work, and its engagement with American history and the present. If there’s one thing the four agreed on, it’s that One Battle After Another is indeed a “very rich text.”
Stealing Time, with Kelly Reichardt, Kent Jones, and Lucio Castro
The Film Comment Podcast
1 hour 2 minutes 18 seconds
1 month ago
Stealing Time, with Kelly Reichardt, Kent Jones, and Lucio Castro
Three films in this year’s NYFF lineup explore the intersections of quotidian life and the arts, following artists whose efforts to make time and space for their creative passions are thwarted or frustrated by the grind of the everyday. In Kent Jones’s Late Fame, adapted from an Arthur Schnitzler novella, a once-upon-a-time New York poet (and now a postal worker) is intoxicated by the sudden attentions of a coterie of twentysomething wannabe poets. In Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, set in the 1970s, an aimless art-school dropout executes a comically sloppy heist at a local museum, as if seeking escape from his banal, bourgeois family life. And in Lucio Castro’s Drunken Noodles, an art student spends a summer in New York, having a series of serendipitous and erotic encounters around painting, poetry, and writing. Each film dwells in how both the making and consuming of art can force life into a pace incompatible with that of the modern world.
Last Sunday at NYFF, Jones, Reichardt, and Castro joined Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute for a conversation exploring the temporality of cinema versus the other arts, the challenge of being a working artist, and the exquisite craft behind their new films.
The Film Comment Podcast
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another has been the talk of the town since its wide release last month—from critics to filmmakers to audiences, the reception has been nothing short of euphoric. Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, the film opens in an unspecified present, detailing the activities of a militant group led by a Black revolutionary (played by Teyana Taylor). Years after her disappearance, her partner (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their daughter (newcomer Chase Infiniti) are hunted down by an old enemy, Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw. The chase takes them across California, with an assortment of other characters becoming embroiled along the way.
The movie is an unabashedly fun, feel-good action flick—one that also calls back to films as disparate as The Searchers, Commando, and Running on Empty. But is it among the greatest of the decade, as some have claimed? Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited critics and programmers Miriam Bale and Adam Piron on the Podcast to discuss the film’s successes and failures, how it fits into PTA’s larger body of work, and its engagement with American history and the present. If there’s one thing the four agreed on, it’s that One Battle After Another is indeed a “very rich text.”
