The One Movie You Must See in Theaters This September: One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson has been making movies for nearly 30 years, and in that time, he’s proven to be one of the more singular voices in American movie-making. Often, September is a transitory month at the movies. The biggest Oscar players haven’t yet been released, but there also aren’t very many movies in summer blockbuster mode.

If you’re looking for one reason to go to the theater this month, though, it’s undoubtedly Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest movie, One Battle After Another. The movie, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a former revolutionary on the hunt for his daughter, is almost guaranteed to be this month’s best release. Here are three reasons to check it out.

Leonardo DiCaprio is at his best as a comedian

Despite the fact that they have both been dominant forces in movies for the past 30 years, DiCaprio and Anderson have never made a movie together. While the actor and director are both capable of making pretty serious movies, One Battle After Another seems to be more of a comedy, and that’s probably for the best.

Especially in recent years, DiCaprio has found himself to be an incredibly adept comedian, capable of diffusing his own movie star good looks to create characters who feel stranger and more idiosyncratic than his earlier roles. One Battle After Another looks to be mostly a comedy, and it appears to be a pretty funny one at that.

It’s loosely adapted from the work of Thomas Pynchon

One Battle After Another seems to be at least loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. This is not the first time over the course of his career that Anderson has adapted Pynchon’s work. 2014’s Inherent Vice was also a Pynchon adaptation, and it made for one of the more baffling films in his entire filmography.

While we won’t know for sure how closely Anderson is drawing inspiration from Pynchon this time around, it seems fair to say that the director is firmly in an era defined by strange, elliptical films, and that might ultimately be a good thing. While Pynchon stories are rarely straightforward, Anderson is the perfect person to adapt him because of his slightly self-aware edge and because he has an incredible facility with the craft of movie-making.

Whatever One Battle After Another winds up being, it’s almost guaranteed to be fascinating.

The movie features a great supporting cast

Although DiCaprio is the name on the poster, and most of the people who see the movie will likely be going to see him, he’s going to be backed up by a great and deep supporting cast. Teyana Taylor, Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn, Regina Hall, and Alana Haim join DiCaprio in the cast.

While we don’t know what role each of them will play, we also know that DiCaprio’s daughter will be played by a relative newcomer named Chase Infiniti. Although this cast includes plenty of heavyweights, these are all also people who know how to be funny. One Battle After Another should expect this movie to be on the funnier end of Anderson’s filmography.

One Battle After Another opens in theaters on September 26, 2025.