One Battle After Another was  written, produced, and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. He’s nowhere near as precious as Wes Anderson (no relation), but he does have his style: dense and intellectual. I enjoyed the film, even though it violated the my prime directive: no film needs to be more than 90 minutes long. It was, basically, three hours, which cost it one star.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know the male leads are Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro. The women are incredible, but to me at least, unknowns.

It is a cliché, usually applied to Morgan Freeman, that you would pay to hear him reading the phonebook (We’re going to need to replace that idiom, for obvious reasons). I would pay just to see these three men make stern faces.

It’s about 60s radicals who never got over the revolution, the damage one of them did to her child, and their nemesis, Col. Steve Lockjaw. Really? I guess since there are no phonebooks anymore, lazy screenwriters can’t just pick a name out of the book.

One of the best things about the film is the mixture of deadly seriousness (literally deadly) with some laugh-out-loud one liners (at the expense of the characters). That’s what makes this self-serious piece of work especially easy to watch.