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One Battle After Another
One of Paul Thomas Anderson’s strengths as a filmmaker is his ability to shift genres, often turning them on their heads and breathing new life into familiar tropes. With One Battle After Another, he sets his sights on an action thriller, and while the results aren’t his best work, they’re a reminder of why he’s one of the most dynamic directors working today. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, a leftist radical who’s been living off the grid with his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) for the past 16 years. When his rival, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), goes hunting for the pair, Pat must reconnect with his revolutionary past to protect his family. This might normally be the setup for a righteous paternal rampage like Taken or Nobody, but Battle instead plays up the absurdity of the hero and villain reviving their feud well into middle age. Pat’s brain has been fried by a decade and a half of paranoia and drug abuse, while Lockjaw has become a preening, image-conscious peacock more concerned about his standing with a cabal of white supremacists than anything else. Anderson lines the story with enough gunfights and car chases to keep the audience entertained while letting the politics stand on their own without being too preachy—but there’s something eerily timely about seeing the Army invade a sanctuary city on a mission of petty grievance and racism. One Battle After Another is ultimately a story of parenthood—Willa has inherited Pat’s war, and he has to make sure she’s ready to fight it. A maturity and sweetness underlies the comedic beats, elevating Anderson’s take on The Struggle into one of the finest films of the year. R. MORGAN SHAUNETTE. Academy, Bagdad, Cinema 21, Hollywood, Laurelhurst, Living Room Theaters, AMC, Cinemark and Regal locations.
Building a Mystery
The biggest female voices of a generation tell the story of Lilith Fair, the groundbreaking all-female rock festival founded by a fed-up Sarah McLachlan, in the new documentary Building a Mystery. It weaves nostalgia with cultural critique, featuring never-before-seen ’90s footage alongside whimsical storytelling that captures the movement’s spirit of rebellion and sisterhood. Lilith Fair has often been synonymous with “crunchy-granola white feminism” and was nicknamed Lesbopalooza by the male-dominated media. But this doc really unveils its importance to the queer community across demographics that include racial identity. The event started gaining massive popularity at a time when being publicly gay was still taboo, and this tour emphasized how revolutionary an all-female lineup of lesbian artists like the Indigo Girls and Tegan and Sara could be. What began with McLachlan, Paula Cole, Jewel and Sheryl Crow grew into a more expansive, multigenre showcase after critics called out its lack of diversity. Soon, stars like Erykah Badu and Missy Elliott joined the lineup, evolving the festival’s sound and reach. Through intimate new interviews with McLachlan, her bandmates and road crew, the film revisits how Lilith Fair became more than a tour; it became a revolutionary musical phenomenon for women in music. TV-14. JAGGER BLAEC. Hulu.
Dead of Winter
End the tyranny of the flashback! Emma Thompson plays a solitary widow named Barb in Dead of Winter. She takes matters into her own hands when she stumbles upon a desperate couple (Marc Menchaca, Judy Greer) kidnapping a young woman. The camera spends time with frozen landscape before launching into a tightly written thriller in which each character strikes a refreshing balance between making realistic mistakes and possessing the kind of survivalist resourcefulness required to live through a northern Minnesota winter. Cinema’s Supporting Actress is a pleasure to watch as Thompson chews the scenery into little ice chips. Her turn as lead is complemented nicely by Menchaca’s softhearted pushover role. But again and again, the momentum is brought to a screeching halt by soggy flashbacks into Young Barb’s life with her late husband. Greer and Menchaca are two of the best things about this film, in part because of how they play off each other. With Thompson alone for most of the story, the film’s storytelling relies on the tired crutch of flashbacks instead of telling her story in the present moment. But maybe that’s expecting too much from Taken to Fargo…I mean, Dead of Winter. R. LUCY GORDON. AMC, Cinemark and Regal locations.
and playing on the small screen...
Alice in Borderland (Season 3)
Japanese sci-fi thriller Alice in Borderland’s newly released third season adds Orpheus to the loosely Lewis Carroll-inspired manga-turned-live series. A quick recap, since Season 2 came out in 2022 and Season 1 dates back to 2019: Arisu (Kento Yamazaki) and friends wake up in the Borderland (abandoned Tokyo) and are forced to play deadly games of wit and endurance. Season 2 sees him and fellow player Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya) survive enough games to battle the game masters to go home. Season 3 flattens Arisu into a wife guy and Usagi from confident badass to fragile crybaby. Dr. Ryuji Matsuyama (Kento Kaku) convinces Usagi she will see her long-dead father again if she nearly dies, and Arisu goes after her. This season’s challenges offer enough stakes to stress-sweat through, although they’re not so creatively diabolical. Pacing is everything with two fewer episodes this season. The first four episodes’ stories are spaced just enough to be bingeable, but the last two’s literalism around building a meaningful future is unnecessary slow. Season 2’s finale was satisfying enough to have comfortably ended the series—Arisu defeated the Queen of Hearts by finishing croquet without dying by suicide and gets a new lease on life. Instead, writers threw in every motivation to go back to Borderland at once (dead dad! Dying wife! Anti-abortion idea of a baby!). Solving the Borderland mystery somehow left less time for characterization—Hiroyuki Ikeuchi fills a suit nicely as mobster Kazuya, for example, but his backstory is only hinted at compared to how much time the first two seasons gave to character development. Season 3 doesn’t meaningfully answer why these worlds are worth surviving, beyond the pursuit of a less gruesome death, and won’t likely win new fans. But its moral of playing honorably during a crisis arrives at the right time. TV-MA. ANDREW JANKOWSKI. Netflix.
