Credits: Rajasekharan Parameswaran / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0.
Tomorrow, September 24, 2025, One Battle After Another (One Battle After Another) by Paul Thomas Anderson lands in French theaters (2 days before the USA), led by Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn. A satire of a post‑Trump America, an action melodrama and black comedy, the film promises the season’s shakeup. In counterpoint, Yes by Nadav Lapid, released in September, examines Israel after October 7. Two visions, the same desire: to make spectacle a political revealer.
Tomorrow, ‘One Battle After Another’ Takes Command
They do not occupy the same terrain. Tomorrow September 24, 2025, One Battle After Another asserts itself as the appointment: a tale of flight, shifting formats up to VistaVision, a royal cast, and that father‑daughter relationship that holds everything. In mirror, Yes by Nadav Lapid, discovered at the Directors’ Fortnight and released in September, extends the political vibration, but from Israel, with a more feverish, pamphleteering gesture.
In Counterpoint: ‘Yes’, A Country’s Fever
In Yes, Nadav Lapid tells of a precarious artist couple, Y., a musician, and Jasmine, a dancer, summoned to compose a new Israeli national anthem. The film begins with the staggering of a society stunned by the attacks of October 7, 2023. Then it unfolds a trajectory mixing farce, trance and unease. Lapid films bodies as one films wounded territory: abrupt movements, tonal ruptures, burlesque outbursts that turn into cold accusation. The mission given to Y., that of setting the nation to music, becomes a raw metaphor: what can art do when political language has fossilized into slogans, and pain saturates everything?
The French press received Yes with fervent curiosity, noting an electrifying, radical and committed gesture on contemporary Israel. Moreover, critics gave an average of about 4.1/5. The screening at the Directors’ Fortnight in spring 2025 confirmed the scope of a vertiginous cinema. Indeed, this short cinema always a bit on the crest, even if it derails the narrative to hit the nerves. Lapid, who was discovered internationally with Synonyms (Golden Bear 2019) then Ahed’s Knee (Jury Prize 2021), pursues his incandescent line. The couple Y./Jasmine sell their art and their bodies to powerful people soothed by entertainment. Absurdity thus becomes a survival strategy, and comedy a way to make reality creak.
The device is both pamphlet and poem. Shots lengthen to let dissonance drone, then shatter into shards. It’s as if the direction sought its own heartbeat. One senses, scene to scene, Lapid’s joy in catching dance gestures, scraps of music and decomposing national fervor into contradictory pieces. Yes does not strike: it stumbles, it stumbles again, and it is in that vertigo that its black beauty lodges. For the filmmaker, now based in Paris, exile is not a distance but an angle, a line of flight to look his burning home in the face.
Paul Thomas Anderson, America On The Run And The Dark Action Comedy
With One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson returns to his obsessions: family, belief, the temptation of utopia, and projects them into a paranoid America. Bob, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, an ex‑revolutionary, lives under a false identity with his daughter Willa. The return of Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) brings the past to the surface, old accomplices reappear, far‑right militias cross paths with leftist fringe groups, and the road becomes a mental trap. Teyana Taylor embodies Perfidia Beverly Hills, a shooting star whose lucidity cuts like a blade, and Benicio Del Toro plays Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, a wayward master and mentor despite himself. Amid the swerves, one simple, terrible question runs through every scene: how to be a father when your profession has been to set the world on fire?
The film, an adaptation of ‘Vineland’ by Thomas Pynchon, mixes action, satire, melodrama, comedy, daydreams and political hangovers. Anderson shoots wide, sometimes in VistaVision, plays formats like a keyboard, and finds the broad pulse he is known for. The emotional core remains the father‑daughter relationship, weakened by years of clandestinity and paranoia. The most spectacular scenes never crush the fragility of faces, black humor slips between chases, a sentimental aside is born in the roar of a rally, an embrace aborts in the shadow of a hangar. One thinks of Chaplin because the film limps, trips, gets up and turns the absurd into momentum.
Warner Bros orchestrates a worldwide release but chooses for the United States an unexpectedly discreet strategy, despite a reported budget around $140 million USD and a five‑star cast. According to Elle magazine, Steven Spielberg reportedly called the film “insane” after seeing it three times. That conveys the cinematic intoxication this generous machine provokes. In France, the 09/24/2025 date stands as a must‑see. All the more so since the breaking news around Leonardo DiCaprio promises a full house and debates after screenings.
DiCaprio And Penn, Two Bodies In Motion
They seem familiar, yet they subvert expectations. Leonardo DiCaprio, whose filmography with Martin Scorsese built a fruitful dialogue, reinvents here his fleeing energy. That dialogue has led him from youthful flamboyance to fractured figures of maturity. Bob is not a hero, but a man who collects his old slogans like crumbs. He tries to piece a life back together with his daughter. DiCaprio plays wear without losing momentum, the comedy of repetition without giving up sadness. Sean Penn, for his part, embodies a feverish Lockjaw, a stagey military man and wounded beast, with an intensity that plays with his reputation as an engaged, sometimes incendiary actor, always on the edge of excess. Their confrontation tastes like the duels one retells for a long time: less an ideological clash than a battle of rhythms, silences and looks.
The troupe around them feeds this tightrope act: Teyana Taylor, stunning in presence, gives Perfidia tragic gravity that owes as much to manner as to the music of her voice. Benicio Del Toro distills danger with a cold humor, between threat and caress, and Regina Hall brings a secret warmth, a counter‑melody. Anderson organizes these intensities like a conductor cutting crescendos. He restarts a gag to refocus an emotion. He slows a chase to let a caress breathe. Rumors report some improvisation on set, that slight drift from which natural gesture often emerges. Yet the film remains contained and rigorously drawn, as if it only accepted chaos within impeccable frames.
Two Satirists Facing The Noise Of The World
There is, in these two films, the same will to look at politics without miming it. Lapid does not film slogans, he films what slogans do to bodies; Anderson does not address a program, he stages the confusion of a public space saturated with signs, militias, larger‑than‑life figures. Yes is written in contradiction: forced laughter, assumed indecency, skid marks as warnings. However, One Battle After Another prefers detour, parable and speed. You never quite know whether you are dreaming, playing or dying of laughter.
Context, on both sides, feeds reception. In Israel, society keeps searching for words to say the aftermath of October 7, 2023. In the United States, the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film takes place in a climate of tension. This climate is weighed down by the political shockwave caused by the assassination of Charlie Kirk in early September 2025. Without loftiness, the films take note of a world where collective narratives unravel and where fiction serves as much as mirror as antidote.
Direction, Or How To Look Differently
You leave Yes feeling you’ve seen more than a program. It’s a struggle of each shot to find its truth. The camera moves like a wounded animal, the music often acts as a chemical revealer. The film, one feels, will be controversial—and that’s a good thing. Moreover, you leave One Battle After Another with the memory of a race that, despite its roars, is rooted in an intimate gesture: a father tries to teach his daughter that one can love without blowing up the world. The varied image formats, VistaVision included, are not coquettish but the translation of a story that changes oxygen depending on its angle of attack.
Remains the age‑old question: can you laugh at everything? Lapid answers with controlled excess, Anderson with ellipsis and tempo. One grabs national rhetoric by the collar, the other uses speed for irony. Both create works of spectacle in the noble sense, with images that jolt. They are question machines and cinemas that remember art is a contact sport.
Release Economics And The Politics Of Images
The discreet release orchestrated by Warner Bros in the United States intrigues, so much does the object resemble an event film. One may see studio caution in an inflammable period. It’s the bet of gradual ascent rather than a fireworks display. Internationally, by contrast, curiosity runs high, and France should respond. For Yes, distribution relies on the Cannes echo and the French taste for cinema that dares. However, the film arrives laden with a reputation as a firebrand, but it mainly offers a staging experience. It’s an experience to argue with.
If one had to bring the two titles together, one would say this: Yes is a punch. It still wants to dance. Meanwhile, One Battle After Another is a gallop. It lets some tears through. Neither gives answers, but both open spaces for conversation. It concerns what we demand of our artists. It’s also about what politics does to our lives. Moreover, it’s about how the dark theater remains a place of friction and memory.
And Now, The Theater
Tomorrow, September 24, 2025, we go for Leonardo DiCaprio who, at 50, finds a new way to inhabit the screen, and for Sean Penn who plays on his fighter aura, we go also for Teyana Taylor and Benicio Del Toro, who offer accents, rhythms, counterpoints, we go then for Nadav Lapid and his unique way of making images sweat. And above all we go for the feeling of bold cinema. Indeed, it does not content itself with accompanying the news. On the contrary, it defies it.
The season often has its mirages; this time, it has two solid realities. Two films tell us, each in its way, that politics is not reserved material. Moreover, it has its tired heroes, its battered dancers, its impossible songs and its awkward fathers. Two films that remind that at the end of the din, there remain looks seeking looks that, sometimes, find.
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