1. One Battle After Another
We’ll be honest: in the run-up to the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, we had no real idea of what to expect. We kinda knew that it had been inspired by a Thomas Pynchon novel; it had Leonardo DiCaprio wearing granny shades and doing a lot of shouting; and that it was his first contemporary-set film since Punch-Drunk Love. When we finally got to see it, we all agreed that this was 2025’s pure kino moment, our jaws constantly on the floor upon witnessing the work of a filmmaker with almost Jedi-like mastery of the medium. Dazzling, pleasurable, memorable – and not just the fact it produced by-far the year’s greatest meme, but the fact it is the film we’ll be watching, in 20, 30, 50 years time.
Read our review.