Tomorrow, September 24, 2025, One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson hits theaters in France (2 days before the USA), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn. A satire of a post-Trump America, action melodrama, and dark humor, the film promises to be the shock of the season. In contrast, Oui by Nadav Lapid, released in September, examines Israel after October 7. Two visions, one same desire: to make the spectacle a political revealer.
Tomorrow, ‘One Battle After Another’ takes the lead
They do not occupy the same terrain. Tomorrow September 24, 2025, One Battle After Another establishes itself as the event: a tale of escape, shifting formats up to VistaVision, a royal cast, and this father-daughter relationship that holds everything together. In contrast, Oui by Nadav Lapid, discovered at the Directors’ Fortnight and released in September, extends the political vibration, but from Israel, with a more feverish and pamphleteering gesture.
In contrast: ‘Oui’, the fever of a country
In Oui, Nadav Lapid tells the story of a precarious artist couple, Y., a musician, and Jasmine, a dancer, tasked with composing a new Israeli national anthem. The film begins with the wavering of a society stunned by the attacks of October 7, 2023. Then, it unfolds a trajectory mixing farce, trance, and discomfort. Lapid films bodies as one films a wounded territory: abrupt movements, tonal shifts, burlesque outbursts that turn into cold accusations. The mission given to Y., to set 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 welcomed Oui with fervent curiosity, noting an electrifying, radical, and engaged gesture on contemporary Israel. Moreover, critics gave it an average of about 4.1/5. The screening at the Directors’ Fortnight in spring 2025 confirmed the scope of a dizzying cinema. Indeed, this short cinema always a bit on the edge, even if it means derailing the narrative to touch the nerves. Lapid, who gained international recognition with Synonyms (Golden Bear 2019) and Ahed’s Knee (Jury Prize 2021), continues his line of incandescence. The couple Y./Jasmine sells their art and bodies to powerful people reassured by entertainment. Absurdity thus becomes a survival strategy, and comedy, a way to make reality creak.
The setup is both a pamphlet and a poem. The shots lengthen to let dissonance buzz, then they shatter into fragments. It’s as if the staging sought its own heartbeat. From scene to scene, one perceives Lapid’s jubilation in capturing dance gestures, snippets of music, and deconstructing national fervor into contradictory pieces. Oui does not assert: it stumbles, it stumbles again, and it is in this vertigo that its dark beauty lies. For the filmmaker, now based in Paris, exile is not a distancing but an angle, a vanishing line to look directly at his burning home.
Paul Thomas Anderson, America on the run and the black action comedy
With One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson revisits 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 groups, and the road becomes a mental trap. Teyana Taylor portrays 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, a simple and terrible question irrigates every scene: how to be a father when one has made a profession of setting the world on fire?
The film, adaptation of ‘Vineland’ by Thomas Pynchon, mixes action, satire, melodrama, comedy, waking dreams, and political hangover. Anderson shoots wide, sometimes in VistaVision, plays with 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 secrecy and paranoia. The most spectacular scenes never overshadow the fragility of faces, dark humor slips between two chases, a sentimental aside is born in the din of a meeting, an embrace aborts in the shadow of a hangar. One thinks of Chaplin because the film limps, stumbles, gets up, and turns the absurd into momentum.
Warner Bros orchestrates a worldwide release but chooses an astonishingly discreet strategy for the United States, despite a reported budget of 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. This reflects the cinematic intoxication provoked by this generous mechanism. In France, the date 09/24/2025 stands out as an unmissable event. Especially since the burning news around Leonardo DiCaprio promises a full house and debates at the exit.
DiCaprio and Penn, two bodies in motion
We think we know them, yet they defy expectations. Leonardo DiCaprio, whose filmography with Martin Scorsese has built a fruitful dialogue, reinvents his energy of escape here. This dialogue has led him from the flamboyance of youth to the fractured figures of maturity. Bob is not a hero, but a man who collects his old slogans like crumbs. He tries to piece together a life with his daughter. DiCaprio plays the weariness without losing the momentum, the comedy of repetition without giving up on sadness. Sean Penn, for his part, embodies a feverish Lockjaw, an operetta soldier and wounded beast, with an intensity that plays with his reputation as an engaged actor, sometimes controversial, always present on the edge of excess. Their face-off has the taste of duels that are recounted for a long time: not so much an ideological confrontation as a battle of rhythms, silences, and glances.
The troupe around them feeds this tightrope walker: Teyana Taylor, stunning in presence, gives Perfidia a tragic gravity that owes as much to the manner as to the music of her voice. Benicio Del Toro distills danger with cold humor, between threat and caress, and Regina Hall brings a secret warmth, a counter melody. Anderson organizes these intensities like a conductor who cuts crescendos. He revives a gag to reframe an emotion. Moreover, he slows down a chase to let a caress breathe. Rumors report some improvisations on set, this slight hesitation from which the naturalness of a gesture often arises. However, the film remains tight and rigorously designed, as if it only accepted chaos within impeccable frames.
Two satirists facing the noise of the world
In these two films, there is the same desire to look at politics without mimicking 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. Oui is written in contradiction: yellow laughter, assumed indecency, slips as many alerts. However, One Battle After Another prefers detour, parable, and speed. One never quite knows if one is dreaming, playing, or dying of laughter.
The context, on both sides, nourishes the reception. In Israel, society continues to search for words to describe the aftermath of October 7, 2023. In the United States, the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film fits into 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 superiority, the films acknowledge a world where collective narratives unravel and where fiction serves as much as a mirror as an antidote.
The staging, or how to look differently
One leaves Oui with the impression of having seen more than a program. It is 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, one leaves 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 affectations, but the translation of a narrative that changes oxygen depending on the angle of attack.
The question remains, as old as cinema: can we laugh at everything? Lapid responds with controlled excess, Anderson with ellipsis and tempo. One grabs national rhetoric by the collar, the other puts speed at the service of irony. Both create works of spectacle in the noble sense, with images that jostle. They are machines of questions and cinemas that remember that art is a contact sport.
Release economy and politics of images
The discreet release orchestrated by Warner Bros in the United States intrigues, as the object resembles a film-event. One might see in it the caution of a studio in an inflammable period. It’s the bet of a gradual rise rather than a fireworks display. Internationally, on the contrary, curiosity is in full play, and France should respond present. For Oui, the distribution relies on the Cannes echo and the French taste for a cinema that dares. However, the film arrives burdened with a reputation as a firebrand, but it mainly offers an experience of staging. It is an experience with which one can and must discuss.
If one were to compare the two titles, one would say this: Oui is a punch. It still wants to dance. Moreover, One Battle After Another is a cavalcade. It lets tears flow. Both provide no answers, but they open spaces for conversation. This concerns what we demand from our artists. It’s also about what politics does to our lives. Furthermore, it’s about how the dark room remains a place of friction and memory.
And now, the theater
Tomorrow, September 24, 2025, we go for Leonardo DiCaprio who, at 50 years old, finds a new way to inhabit the screen, and for Sean Penn who plays with his aura of a fighter, we also go for Teyana Taylor and Benicio Del Toro, who offer accents, rhythms, counterpoints, we then go for Nadav Lapid and his unique way of making images sweat. And we go above all for the sensation of bold cinema. Indeed, it does not just accompany the news. On the contrary, it challenges it.
The season often has its mirages, this time, it has two solid realities. Two films tell us, each in their own way, that politics is not a reserved matter. Moreover, it has its tired heroes, its battered dancers, its impossible songs, and its clumsy fathers. Two films that remind us that at the end of the noise, there are still glances seeking glances that, sometimes, find.