When their evil enemy resurfaces after 16 years, a group of ex-revolutionaries reunite to rescue one of their own’s daughter.

We only get a new Paul Thomas Anderson movie about once every presidential administration so it’s best to savor them while they’re out. His resume is filled with a wide range of films that are always wholly unique and individualistic. His Boogie Nights is one of my all-time faves, a sprawling epic about the porn industry in the 70s and 80s. Magnolia was a sprawling epic about broken people and, well, a rain of frogs. He’s tackled the oil industry at the beginning of the 20^th century, the beginnings of a religious cult after World War II, and the life of a dressmaker in 1950s London. He’s pulled career-best performances out of everyone from Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Daniel-Day Lewis to Adam Sandler and Mark Wahlberg.

With One Battle After Another, he’s adapting (kind of) Thomas Pynchon (again, after 2014’s Inherent Vice), weaving a story about family, revolution, and complex racial issues (while Anderson is white, he is the father of four mixed-race children with his partner Maya Rudolph). The film centers around Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), a perennially doped ex-revolutionary in hiding, single parent to his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti, who broke out last year with her first role in the mini-series Presumed Innocent). A military leader (Sean Penn, icily eerie) is on the hunt for Bob and Willa, sixteen years after they went underground.

It’s really best to let the plot unfold in front of you than to get too mired in the details. While it is a long film (over 2 and a half hours), it never feels tedious (as opposed to the easily an hour too long Magnolia which found room for two different old men dying of cancer arcs). Here, every scene is not only exquisitely shot and acted, but they also feel supremely necessary to the overall whole of the film. Battle is extremely dark, sometimes twisted, often hilarious, surprising, important, relevant and, really, somewhat of a masterpiece. DiCaprio is at his best balancing the heaviness with the right mix of grounded humor. Infiniti is a star who commands every moment she’s on screen. Penn is downright scary. There are also great supporting turns from Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, and Benicio Del Toro, who all appear too briefly, yet come with their own complex, fully-realized characters. I really can’t rave enough.

Jonathan’s grade – A