While I’m certainly not the most qualified judge of what does and doesn’t constitute “art,” I’m confident in my belief that art is usually decided by its ability to weather time. Great art transcends it; unworthy art stays trapped in it. Film is unique among artistic mediums in that it condenses a lot of cognitive and emotional processing into a short time window. So, it can be at turns the most potent and the most fleeting of art’s forms: its immediacy gives it immense emotional force, but that same immediacy often seduces its makers into confusing urgency for timeless truth.
Compared with literature or still art or even music, film compresses sensory experience into a form that at times can feel involuntary, as if it’s happening to you. A book asks you to collaborate, your mind serving as the projector. Film projects for you, frames for you, edits for you, scores for you. The transformation of sensory input into thought happens faster, closer to the nervous system. In the debate over which artistic medium is most influential (setting aside that people don’t read books anymore), it’s not that film is more profound than literature but about how quickly it reaches the place where meaning gets made. That efficiency is what makes its influence unique.
It is with this understanding that discerning viewers will judge Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, an ostensibly politically conscious, character-driven action movie garnering unanimous praise among the critical establishment and in the taste-making columns of the American intelligentsia. It’s his most technically commanding and stylistically engaging work in years—beautifully shot, precisely cut, confidence with every stroke. And yet, for all its virtuosity, the film feels neutered by its own supposed relevance. The fatal flaw lies in its contemporary setting, with the salience of its message deriving entirely from Anderson’s grasp of the current moment (or rather, the current thing).
Anderson, who’s made a career out of mythologizing history and occasionally locating deeper patterns beneath it, here stays comfortably close to the surface. The film’s present-day setting, moral posturing, and general lack of historical awareness (much less contextualization) make it feel reactive rather than reflective. Instead of mapping how the present fits into a longer, systemic continuum (which is what his earlier films did brilliantly at times), he ends up reproducing the present’s moral and aesthetic vocabulary. In doing so, he falls into the familiar post-postmodern trap of mistaking recognition for insight and empathy for understanding, flattening living systems into static caricature.
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Anderson opens by introducing the audience to a nominally revolutionary group called the French 75 staging a prison break at the U.S.–Mexico border, aiming to free detained immigrants. It’s led by Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a Black radical whose dom-power kinks and skirmishes with her cartoonish nemesis—a neo-Nazi-evincing ICE commander named Lockjaw (Sean Penn)—quickly blur into farce. Amid a whirlwind of montaged “resistance” scenes, Perfidia gets pregnant (apparently) by her pothead, bomb-making white boyfriend Bob (DiCaprio), then abandons both him and their newborn, refusing to bind herself to anything that might interrupt her devotion to the cause.
Two minutes later, a botched bank job ends with Perfidia executing a guard, getting arrested, and selling out her comrades in exchange for a promise of suburban normalcy in “mainstream America.” After ratting out the movement’s leaders, she abruptly spurns the deal and flees across the border into Mexico soon after her state rehabilitation counselor advises her to “get a job.” Just like that, she’s in the wind.
Fast-forward sixteen years: Perfidia’s daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) is now a teenager, and Bob a single father clinging to revolutionary ideals—chain-smoking joints, eating takeout, looping leftist film canon on his TV, and occasionally pausing to play overbearing, out-of-touch Gen-X dad. That’s when a still-obsessed Lockjaw reignites old tensions, launching raids to neutralize the last remnants of the French 75. Perfidia’s former ally Deandra (Regina Hall) is called back into action, rescuing Willa from a high-school dance while Bob, with help from a sensei-like Harriet-Tubman figure, Sergio (Benicio del Toro), struggles to recall the secret passwords needed to reach her before the assassins do—assassins commissioned by a secretive cabal of white Christian nationalists who worship genetic purity and Saint Nicholas.
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After the final frame cuts to black, we’re reminded by the closing credits that One Battle After Another is Anderson’s (very) loose interpretation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland—a sobering splash of cold water for anyone in the audience who may have once known this but since forgotten over the film’s 160-minute runtime.
Vineland is Pynchon’s post-sixties requiem, a novel about the afterlife of revolt once the resistance is absorbed by bureaucracy, its spirit curdling into nostalgia. Set mostly in 1984 Northern California, it follows Zoyd Wheeler, a former radical hippie who now survives by faking insanity for government checks, and his estranged daughter Prairie, who begins tracing the story of her mother, frenzy-turned-informant Frenesi Gates. Frenesi, once a renegade filmmaker devoted to capturing revolutionary truth, sold out her collective to the feds, betraying the revolution and her ideals in a moment that lingers in time, its consequences reverberating through the next generation.
Beneath its stoner humor and paranoid sprawl, Vineland is about how American rebellion gets absorbed, commodified, and turned into lifestyle. Pynchon shows how the counterculture that once resisted empire became part of its operating system. The personal and the political collapse into the same loop: every act of defiance ends up feeding the state’s archive. In the end, the revolution is not only televised—it’s syndicated.
And that’s where Anderson’s One Battle After Another fails. Pynchon looks backward with ironic clarity, dissecting the ruins of the sixties from the vantage of the Reagan era, when the consequences of their failures had crystallized. Anderson looks at the French 75 head-on but refuses distance, historical context, or deeper irony. His radicals remain mid-movement, trapped in the immediacy of struggle, not yet sedimented into history.
Anderson shows some sense for the texture of paranoia, decay, and blurred moral frontiers that Pynchon mined, but never really grapples with the architecture behind them. His world is historically disembodied. He depicts it like someone who’s lived in it but never traced its genealogy, so the politics feel ambient; detached rather than dialectical, bounded by the two-dimensionality of his own era’s moral syntax. He’s fluent in guilt, in empathy, in outrage—all noble currencies—but he can’t transact beyond them.
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The film’s hollow politics become evident in its refusal to articulate any coherent ideology beyond the slogan-level radicalism it opens with. The underground network, the ICE subplot, the border raids all gesture toward meaning but never merge, because the film itself doesn’t seem to believe in anything. It borrows the grammar of resistance without revealing the structure of thought that gives it weight.
The opening sequence, set during the French 75’s supposed heyday, somewhere between the late Bush years and the start of Obama’s, looks and feels identical to the present day two decades later. Perfidia’s “free people, free bodies, free borders” refrain remains frozen in time, repeated but never re-examined. “Sixteen years later, and the world has changed very little,” Willa observes. The film’s world hasn’t evolved, and neither have its politics. The “resistance” is still fighting the same fight against the same system with the same moral vocabulary. Anderson suspends us in a landscape where slogans stand in for cogent thought and rebellion exists only as muscle memory. The result is a world that feels less timeless than time-dead—a closed loop where rebellion and repression have merged into the perennial present.
And that betrays the film’s unintentional philosophy. By rendering sixteen years indistinguishable, Anderson flattens history into mood. Politics become aesthetics; struggle becomes atmosphere. The viewer isn’t watching the evolution of a system but the eternal recurrence of its imagery: border fences, detention centers, riot police, grain-filtered rage. It’s activism without memory. Anderson’s earlier films understood time as a structuring intelligence. There Will Be Blood moves through eras of extraction and consequence, The Master maps belief as a postwar contagion. Here, time is static, unprocessed; the present depicted as if it were already myth.
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In Vineland, Pynchon shows how revolution gets metabolized by the very systems it seeks to upend. The counterculture becomes a bureaucratic appendage of the state, its radicals reabsorbed as civil servants or caseworkers, their energy folded back into the welfare machine. Ultimately resistance itself becomes another input for governance and control.
Anderson brushes up against that same theme but never seems to notice. His film flirts with the idea that revolution and repression have become indistinguishable, then retreats into sentimentality. He opens with the French 75 liberating detainees at an immigration center, inverting the sequence sixteen years later when Lockjaw’s federal unit descends on a poultry plant employing undocumented workers. The parallel is obvious: the very open-borders cause once driving the resistance has been assimilated into the logic of cheap labor, the economic engine of the system itself. What began as revolt now sustains the machine. But Anderson leaves it hanging, as if unaware of the irony.
The contradiction deepens with Sensei Sergio, whose underground railroad shelters undocumented immigrants, and who serves as the film’s moral compass—the epitomized spirit of resistance. The story never asks what happens to those migrants after they pass through his network. Are they destined to replace the immigrant factory workers rounded up by Lockjaw’s ICE unit? Is the revolution literally sustaining the economy it claims to resist? The only acknowledgment Anderson offers is a throwaway line from a government official to the effect of: “Chicken prices are about to get more expensive.” It’s framed as irony, but if that’s the punchline, what exactly are we fighting for—the dignity of immigrants, or affordable poultry?
If his intention is to imply the latter, then surely the film’s final frames—as Willa hears radio chatter about another faceless protest in Oakland and sprints out the door to join it—should be read as tragic irony, right? Anderson never clarifies what this protest is about, but there’s no reason to think it’s anything other than a pro-immigration rally against the film’s ICE villains. Instead of feeling ironic or aware, though, it lands as sentimental: Willa picking up her mother’s torch after reading the letter she left her years ago, now feeling fulfilled and complete, off to fight the same fight waged by her long line of freedom-fighting ancestors. Either way, the effect is the same: the cause itself has become irrelevant. The revolution persists as reflex, not conviction.
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Lockjaw is introduced as a cartoon fascist acting on behalf of a cult of white Christian nationalists who literally pray to Santa Claus. The absurdity might have worked as grotesque satire had Anderson used it to reveal something about the machine these people serve. Instead, power becomes parody. The only figure who feels real is the military interrogator who practices “enhanced” verbal techniques—including empathy—to extract information from detainees. He’s genuinely terrifying because he represents ideology’s replacement by process. But Anderson doesn’t seem to notice. He’s too busy laughing at the Nazi clowns in the bunker to recognize that the interrogator might be a more unsettling face of the real machine: a smiling embodiment of the system’s cold precision and ideological indifference.
Perfidia Beverly Hills—her very name meaning treachery—seems to be the embodiment of the collapse of revolutionary ideals. But Anderson gives her only posture, treating her as an aesthetic device rather than a subject with beliefs or depth. By flattening her into contradiction without intent, he leaves us guessing: is this supposed to be an indictment of Black radicalism itself, a comment on the futility of resistance, or just a director unwilling to take any politics seriously? The film’s refusal to decide makes every position feel provisional, as though belief itself were naïve.
After demanding “free people, free bodies, free borders,” Perfidia betrays her comrades the moment she’s caught and abandons her child without reflection. The movie flirts with making her implied rape (although it’s not entirely clear that there was one) by Lockjaw the fracture point of her idealism but never circles back. Is the revolution undone by structural violence, or by narrative convenience? Anderson leaves it to implication, as if half-hearted hand-waving at meaning were enough—or as if the critics could be trusted to connect and broadcast the rest.
When Perfidia returns home pregnant, her mother scolds Bob for obstructing her “destiny,” invoking a lineage of women freedom fighters. The film never asks who these ancestors were or what they fought for—so we must assume, by default, that it must have been for open borders. Did Perfidia herself feel crushed by the weight of inheriting a “revolution” she no longer believes in? Was the promise of cheap poultry not enough? The family’s wealth complicates things further: chandeliers, crown moldings, walls hung with expensive art. The setting looks like old-money luxury, maybe plantation wealth repossessed and rebranded. Anderson never touches this either. Is the film trying to say “Black people can be rich too,” or that the revolution evolves into aristocracy? He seems uninterested in exploring any deeper questions.
Even the film’s Gen-Z subplot feels half-baked. Willa’s high-school friend—a gender-fluid classmate played for awkward comic relief—introduces a new wave of identity radicalism that the script neither critiques nor dignifies. Bob reacts with weary condescension when meeting Willa’s friend, like a Gen-X liberal lost in the post-woke lexicon. The scene briefly feels self-aware until, in a later interrogation, that same nonbinary character becomes the first to betray Willa by giving the interrogator her secret phone number, which lets them track her location. It could have been a sly commentary on how every generation’s rebellion is pre-coopted, how identity itself becomes another lever of control. But Anderson never clarifies. What might have been subversive allegory collapses into random meaninglessness.
Regina Hall’s Deandra is the only character who feels tethered to reality—a competent ex-revolutionary who rescues Willa from a school dance and hides her at a convent of Black nuns moonlighting as marijuana growers. The setup is at least interesting, a vision of the movement’s ghosts surviving under prohibition-era logic, but Anderson reduces it to farce. ICE agents stop at a gas station, ask for directions, and immediately find the hideout. Some slapstick revolution indeed.
And that’s the film’s real failure, born of Anderson’s decision to set it in the present. It can’t decide whether power is ideological or procedural, whether evil comes from belief or automation. So it treats both as jokes. Perfidia’s movement, Lockjaw’s crusade, the state’s apparatus: all reduced to theater. What could have been a study of how systems metabolize opposition instead becomes a puppet show where everyone is and always has been rather hollow.
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In the end, Anderson can’t escape the therapeutic impulse dominating modern auteurism: the belief that empathy and moral clarity are sufficient substitutes for analytic depth. As usual, this soft humanism provides a sort of ideological cover, its maker unable to confront the machinery of control without reducing it to identity or shallow virtue. Modern art—and by extension, modern thought (to whatever degree one believes life imitates art)—has flattened that geometry into a single moral plane. Everything must be “relevant,” “human,” “empathetic.” The artist becomes a mirror instead of a lens, reflecting the audience’s moment back with a slight aesthetic sheen.
Pynchon (and the leftist radicals he channeled) always insisted that paranoia had a lineage—military-industrial evolution, bureaucratic mission creep, psychological warfare, commodification of dissent. He used fragmentation to locate hidden order, viewing coincidence amidst chaos not as noise but as evidence of design. His paranoia worked because it gestured toward an intelligence without identity, systems that behave like gods but are better understood by their feedback loops.
Anderson lets that float free. He treats present-day aesthetics of collapse as if they exist in a vacuum rather than as the latest iteration of a centuries-old machinery. He’s made a film that looks like Pynchon without realizing Pynchon’s genius lies in his recognition that true terror is in knowing there is an order—and that you’re already trapped inside it. Anderson, perhaps unconsciously, replaces that with the comfort of moral legibility, collapsing complexity into an ethnic-moral villainy. So instead of the world being terrifyingly self-organizing, it’s comfortably anthropomorphic: the evil has a face, a cross, and a country club. That lets the audience exhale. They can locate blame. Which makes it ring hollow.
The very best filmmakers let audiences glimpse what it feels like to inhabit the world as a multilayered system—material, psychological, historical, cosmic—the understanding that some ways of seeing contain others, that consciousness itself stratifies. This requires a certain humility, and it’s that awareness that lets a piece of art breathe across eras even when its surface details date. Here, it’s not clear what Anderson believes—or whether he believes in belief at all—which prevents One Battle After Another from transcending its moment. His problem isn’t that he lacks answers but that he lacks even questions, and as such, his latest work will be remembered only for its technical brilliance and for how perfectly it reflected the shallowness of its time.
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Respecting complexity doesn’t mean forgoing simple truths; it means embedding them inside a larger geometry. Art is the one mechanism that allows for god’s-eye recursion—zooming all the way out without surrendering to detachment, translating that higher awareness back into emotional frequency. The artist’s job isn’t to moralize within the flat plane of modern experience. It’s to let the audience feel the curvature of that plane, to sense the limits of their own horizon. Artists are uniquely able to achieve this elevated vantage and thus obligated to attempt it, especially those with Anderson’s abilities and social capital.
In truth, cinema’s own dynamics often work against it. Its form demands capital, coordination, insurance, distribution; every step an interface with bureaucracy. It’s almost impossible for true originality to survive a process that begins inside such corporate logic. Even so-called independent film rarely escapes that gravity. Independence has become an aesthetic: financed, platformed, curated. Writing, painting, sound—these can still arise from a single consciousness, privately, until the work folds back on itself and reveals something unique. Film’s brilliance is born of collaboration, yet that interdependence restricts its freedom—its meaning distilled and reshaped as it passes through the filters of studio convention.
That’s why the handful of directors who manage to pull transcendence through the machinery feel so singular. Beyond their prodigious talents, they’re structurally defiant. They find ways to bend an industrial medium until it behaves like an organic one, introducing risk, instability, emergence—the sense that the work is discovering itself even as it’s being made. Auteurs, with their rare creative autonomy and final-cut rights, are expected to attempt this act of subversion. It’s the price of their privilege. When they don’t—when they merely reproduce the moral reflexes of their audience instead of confronting them—they betray that higher purpose, and it becomes the viewer’s responsibility to call out.
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It’s with this in mind that we turn to the critics, the cultural compasses of our time. Even if one reads One Battle After Another as charitably as possible—granting Anderson every intention toward meaning—the critical response remains revealing. That they resoundingly don’t get it would make Anderson seem aloof, at best, or otherwise cynically ambivalent toward his own cultural influence.
What’s most striking in reading the critical consensus is how uniformly it celebrates the film for precisely what makes it shallow. The New Yorker’s Justin Chang marvels that “the sixties haunt the film in ways obvious and not,” admiring Anderson’s “wise” choice to dispense with flashbacks—or indeed any historical grounding whatsoever—so the story can barrel unimpeded “into the urgency of the now.” Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert calls it “a deeply humanist story of rebellion that will be read as 2020s political commentary despite never using terms like MAGA or Antifa,” hailing its “timeless story of resistance” and praising Anderson for creating a film that allows viewers to “embed any timely commentary one wants to read in it” (one’s left to wonder what the MAGA crowd might read in it). A pattern emerges: a film that can be read as anything; timelessness as the literal absence of temporality rather than the mark of transcendence.
David Sims in The Atlantic calls Anderson’s “willingness to touch such a raw nerve” “astonishing”. Which raw nerve? “The complexities of political violence.” It’s a formulation familiar to anyone with passing awareness of the moral imagination of American film critics. Sims assures us the movie “feels urgent,” “rife with big ideas,” but “never didactic”—the magic triad of cultural relevance. Urgency, for Sims and his comrades, becomes the measure of seriousness: the faster something moves, the more it must matter. The film’s urgency means it’s enough that Anderson waves vaguely at politics; the gesture flatters them with the illusion of real engagement while sparing them any discomfort.
Amy Nicholson in the LA Times is impressed that Anderson “reoriented the story around race” and that his villains “look ghastly in their own wretched skin,” which she calls “moral clarity.” Owen Gleiberman in Variety calls the movie a “chill warning” and a “wake-up call” to “the fierce urgency of now.” He applauds its “relatability,” the word critics reach for when trying to put their finger on a film’s agreeable political posturing. He admires that “Anderson never loses the pulse of humanity,” meaning only that he never risks alienating his liberal audience by making them confront their own culpability in the state of the society they mourn.
“Lockjaw’s transgression with Perfidia Beverly Hills takes us back to the hidden commingling of the races that was there at America’s foundation—the systemic rape of enslaved women by slaveholders,” Gleiberman writes, before pronouncing nostalgia for this sexual tension as “nothing less than the key fantasy driving the new alt-right America.” He insists that the film’s secret society of white nationalists, the “Christmas Adventurers Club,” is not “obviously satirical,” that its “creepy man talk” is “too ominously close for comfort to what’s happening off-camera within the current American power structure.” It’s the totalizing move typical of contemporary political commentary: history into allegory, allegory into tweet, tweet into therapy.
Manohla Dargis in The New York Times calls the film “a no to complacency, to oppression, to tyranny.” Describing the French 75, she writes, “The group’s beliefs are pretty straightforward (equality, freedom), if fuzzy on specifics”—a sentence so serene in its irony it could stand as the eventual epitaph of liberal thought: earnest, noble, and fatally incurious about its own premises. She praises Anderson for not “spelling out its revolutionary ideology,” which is to say she’s grateful he spared her the burden of confronting one. She lauds the film’s unevenness: “not everything fits together, which only strengthens its realism.” Thus incoherence becomes authenticity; dissonance becomes depth; criticism becomes affective loyalty, her own lingering confusion proof of artistic success. “Few filmmakers today,” Dargis gushes, “could—with the image of a heavily pregnant Black revolutionary firing a machine gun—create a cry from the heart that’s also a crystallizing image of resistance.” It’s a line that gives away the whole economy: moral capital accrued through aesthetics. What matters is not what the image means but that it feels righteous.
Adam Nayman in The Ringer calls the film “the most explicitly political movie of Anderson’s career,” praising its “superb craft” and “vertiginous worldview,” before concluding that its revelation is that “there’s no cause that’s going to last a billion years” (or even sixteen). The insight, apparently, is futility: nothing matters, so be kind to your kids as they head out and “fight our battles for us, whether they want to or not,” for “that’s the tour of duty that we’ve signed them up for.”
Nayman notes how, midway through the film, Anderson depicts a “standoff between a group of riot police and armed protesters,” escalating to violence with a shot of “a crisis actor [his careful way of saying “federal agent provocateur”] lobbing a Molotov cocktail from behind enemy [protestor] lines [at the cops].” Nayman calls it admirable that such an image survived the studio filter: “Whatever else you can say about a major studio investing over $100 million in this particular movie, the fact that this shot made the final cut reflects admirably on some executive,” a compliment which perhaps reveals more than it intends. It’s an interesting kind of admiration—one that assumes the real obstacle to political art is executive timidity, as if there would be a renaissance of risk-taking if only the right suits allowed it. It’s not the kind of thought that interests Nayman, though, because to engage with it would be to expose the truth: that the terminal constraint isn’t overt censorship at all, but the subconscious, self-censoring complicity of critics like Nayman.
In any event, what Nayman is unable to recognize is that any supposed risk attached to signing off on such an image was neutralized by the rest of the film. Its meaning had already been dictated by the political atmosphere that made it legible. Studio executives could rely on the audience’s reflexive associations—riot gear, crackdowns, border tension—to register as commentary on Trump-era authoritarianism. It would read as brave without ever threatening anyone. The system knows how to market moral opposition to itself, and here it does so flawlessly: dissent rendered as brand safety, radicalism pre-cleared for liberal consumption. I could go on about the recursive irony—the way Anderson’s film enacts and inspires precisely the cycle of moral commodification Pynchon was diagnosing—and the modern critic’s blissful ignorance of any of it, but you get the idea.
What unites these critics is the reverent tone in which they implicitly argue that emotional sincerity is the highest form of intelligence. They praise One Battle After Another not for what it says, but for how gently it refuses to say anything that would make them feel uncomfortable. Ideology has become ambience, morality a mood. And so the professional explainers of our culture find themselves applauding a filmmaker for having the courage to not make us think too hard.
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The greatest filmmakers—Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Bergman, Antonioni, Lynch, Malick, Wong Kar-Wai, Lee Chang-Dong—all, in different ways, use time as a unifying material. They slow it, bend it, loop it. They make you feel past and present bleeding into each other. They choreograph contradiction until it becomes rhythm, showing you what it feels like to exist in a reality where beauty and horror, agency and impotence, meaning and absurdity are simultaneous and inseparable. In making a film about the eternal right-now, Anderson spurns this tradition, to his own detriment. He recognizes symbols of modern repression, but he doesn’t comprehend their historical or structural lineage. So any of his seemingly subversive political gestures read as accidental accuracy rather than intentional synthesis.
It’s the trap a lot of “political” filmmakers fall into: they notice patterns in the present and assume that noticing equals understanding. But real understanding would mean showing how those same forms reconstitute across decades—how pro–open-borders slogans become pro–cheap-consumer-goods slogans; how protests against perpetual war become human-rights agencies become regime-change logic; how left-targeting COINTELPRO becomes right-targeting PATCON becomes the Patriot Act.
Here, Anderson’s aesthetic still feels mythic—the rhythm, the craft, the score—but the content can’t sustain the weight of that form because it’s thematically underdeveloped, as if he’s built a cathedral on top of a foundation made from this morning’s headlines. That’s why this film exposes him. In his best work, mythic distance cloaked the limits of his philosophical framework. You could project vastness onto his ambiguity. But now that he’s stepped into the contemporary, the ambiguity has evaporated and what remains is moral simplicity rendered gorgeously.
That’s the risk of making popular political art in the present tense. Irrespective of its technical brilliance, once the awe of its precision fades, we’re left wondering whether Anderson has simply become a prisoner of the moment—or if the moment has revealed he has nothing original to say.
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