Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another will soon be available to watch at home, as reported by Variety, with a streaming release date set for Australian and American audiences on December 19 on HBO Max. That follows a $204 million draw from the worldwide box office, the biggest yet of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s career.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Benicio del Toro and Chase Infiniti, One Battle After Another follows a washed-up revolutionary (DiCaprio) who must save his teenage daughter (Infiniti) after she’s kidnapped by a merciless army officer (Penn). The film is loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland.
After premiering on September 26, the film received immense critical and audience praise for its story, direction and performances. All signs point to it being an Oscar frontrunner in 2026 after it recently picked up an impressive nine nominations at the Golden Globes, including best picture.
Rolling Stone’s David Fear, in his review, summarises that “Paul Thomas Anderson’s stunning, thundering thriller about fathers, failed revolutions and our fucked-up times is, simply put, the movie of the year.”
“Anderson is intent on telling a story, not blithely showing off,” Fear wrote. “If this ambitious tale of familial bonds and institutional might also offers a rebuke to the idea that the movies are a thing of the past and should just go gently into the night, that’s a bonus. It’s a giant, fit-to-burst attempt to be as intimate as possible.”
Variety’s Chief Film Critic Owen Gleiberman named One Battle After Another as the best film of 2025, saying, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s greatest film since ‘Boogie Nights’ is a dystopian adventure of hair-raising relevance and haunting desperation. It’s at once a political thriller, a bravura chase movie, a world-turned-upside-down satire, a movingly fraught father-daughter love story — and, more than that, a movie that plants us in the paranoid cave of anxiety that is life in an autocratic society, in this case one that uncannily mirrors what’s happening to our own Disunited States.”
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