The New York Film Festival 2015

[Chris Knipp]

New York Film Festival 2025



GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD

LIST OF MAIN SLATE

LINKS TO THE REVIEWS

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT (Jafar Panahi 2025)
THE LAST ONE FOR THE ROAD (Francesco Sossai 2025)
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (Paul Thomas Anderson 2025)
THE SECRET AGENT (Kleber Mendonça Filho 2025)
SIRAT (Oliver Laxe 2025)

[Chris Knipp]

SIRÂT (Oliver Laxe 2025)

The crooked path

This is an absolutely stunning film about what becomes a desperate journey across the Moroccan Saharan desert. It won the Cannes Jury Prize this year for Oliver Laxe. It's undesirable to reveal too much about how it turns out but let's start with the title. "Sirât" (صراط) means "path" or "way" in Arabic and occurs in the most often repeated part of the Holy Qur'an, the "Fatiha" or "Opening," in the line that goes, "Show us the straight path, The path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who have evoked [Your] anger or of those who have gone astray." "Those who have gone astray" is ٱلضَّآلِّينَ "al-dhâlîn," meaning also "those in darkness," or even "the evil ones." The film starts with a desert festival or rave, then Luis (Sergi Lopez) and his young son Esteban (Bruno Nuñez Arjuna) begin to follow in their van people making a difficult trek across the desert to another rave. They are searching for Luis' lost grown daughter. It is an ill fated journey. The electronic musical soundtrack is essential and haunting. This is an experience, the kind of film that makes me remember why I love cinema, how it can change me and be unforgettable, even after many years of watching.

The initial rave itself, from set up of the rough enormous speakers to the disbanding of the illegal event by truck caravan of the Moroccan military, is itself such a bone-numbing and haunting event that you might think it would overwhelm the rest of the film and story that consists of a small trek of several big vehicles and the little van of Luis, which is ill suited to this difficult terrain. But you would be wrong, and this is where the brilliance of Laxe's construction and storytelling is revealed. Eventually what happens on the journey is so shocking and disturbing it very well holds its own. At the same time the rave continues to haunt you. It is a scene so strange, so wrong, yet addictive and compelling enough to be the black hole into which the young and vulnerable, like Luis' daughter might be swallowed.

Again, remember the soundtrack, which makes the rave also echo in your ears, for the "music," it's pointed out by one traveller in the little band Luis gets desperately jointed to, isn't music but pure vibration, a hypnotic shaking of your soul.

Reviews commonly jump to this film's "existential quest" or "lost soul" aspect, but I want to stress that while such implications are hinted at even from the title itself, this is above all a supremely visceral experience. It might remind you of other famous films of doomed journeys like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Wages of Fear, but it ups the ante big time. In the light of this viscerality and the wake of a blunt, visceral, doomed story with life-and-death stakes (some of the best of Hemingway also comes to mind), the occasional hints of a "Third World War" or end of the world happening outside strike a slightly wrong, artificial note in the film, while they do also have the value of showing how these people are shut off into their own claustrophobic and narrow world.

That world of Luis and Esteban expands, yet sets its limits with the band of rave-groupies they are joined to and depend on once the journey starts. This is a gnarly crew of tattooed, dead-end misfits. One lacks the fingers of one hand, another has a peg leg (and these aren't CGI disfigurements). Steff (Stefania Gadda), Josh (Joshua Liam Herderson), Bigui(Richard Bellamy 'Bigui'), Tonin (Tonin Janvier), and they form a Spanish-French European union, because they seem to mix the two languages, giving a sense of this as a haphazard yet strong community, where each is defined yet embraced for their peculiarities.

Where Laxe triumphs is in the intense physicality, stone, sand, water, metal of trucks, a huge damaged tire, the closeness of an embrace, all the little band huddled together in a truck to sleep, and then, physically frightening yet beautiful, the desert itself, "shimmering," as the cliche goes, but indistinguishable sometimes from a vast opaque sea into which one might fall and be lost forever. Sirat rocks you between the specific and the infinite, providing an experience both wonderful and terrifying.

This is a genre, if one can call it that, that's deeply appealing but not for everyone. The Oscar Expert, who loved it most of what he saw at Cannes (till Sentimental Value came along, perhaps), noted that some in the audience around him were not moved as he was and just didn't get it, and that can happen. But this is a masterpiece of its kind and one of the year's most distinctive films. It's the kind of riveting experience that may even make you review your own life as it makes its journeyers review theirs. It conveys Werner Herzog's message about how easily humans overestimate their power over nature.

Sirat, 115 minutes, premiered at Cannes in Competition, winning the Jury Prize, also showing in many other international festivals including Toronto and New York, for the later of which it is reviewed here. Metacritic rating: 82%.

[Chris Knipp]

WAGNER MOURA IN THE SECRET AGENT

KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO: THE SECRET AGENT (2015)

"Brazil in 1977, a period of great mischief"

This year we have another great film about life under Brazil's 1970's dictatorship, very different from Walter Salles' I'm Still Here, which won the 2025 Oscars for Best International Feature Film, Best Picture, and Best Actress. Kleber Mendonça Filho casts a wider net, with comedy, rich social detail, and Hitchcockian suspense. For some this may be too complicated. For many though, it's a delight. This one is about a researcher on the run from the south to his native Recife because he has offended an evil government-friendly businessman who chooses to shut down his academic research. Sound familiar? It did to me.

We meet Marcelo Alves (Walter Moura) on the run but why isn't unveiled till later and instead the focus, as he stops his bright yellow VW Bug at a gas station is on the corruption of the cops and the indifference to murder.

Marcelo'S escape is aided by a resistance group that sends him to a boarding house of "refugees" run by a feisty little old lady called Dona Sebastiana (a terrific Tania Maria. Paret of the time we are following the hit men, who wind up hiring a lower level guy o do the actual hit. Bargaining at each level takes place.

Mendonça Filho is from Recife and his last film was a documentary ode to the town's lost grand movie houses of his youth. This is woven through here too in ingenious ways, again and again. The hit men go to a movie projected by Marcelo's father-in-law. He is a widower. He is here also to see his five-year-old son, being raised by his in-laws, who wants to see Jaws, Marcelo's father-in-law deems too scary for him and he's drawn the ads, which give him nightmares, but those vanish when he finally in fact does see the film. Marcelo's grown up son, in a sequel, played by Walter Moura again, nruns a blood bank housed in what once was the movie house where he saw Jaws as a boy. Another movie the father-in-law's cinema is showing is Jean-Paul Belmondo in Le Magnifique, whom the trailer calls "The Secret Agent," so that's where the title comes from.

When Marcelo goes to the police station to seek help toward the end of the film, the camera slips by a large collection of face photos of "Swindlers and Con Artists," and right above it is the portrait of the dictator, Ernesto Geisel. The film is packed with little details like this.

Mendonça Filo procedes by indirection. We don't find out what happens to Marcelo till the epilogue, but the Hitchcockian part leads to violence involving the hit men. There qre also interesting needle drops featuring actual needles dropping and vinyl records. I almost forgot to mention that it's Carnival time in Recife, and there is a headcount of dead in the fair that rises to 91. THe director plays with other things, including land lines and pay phones, which are constantly talking to each other.

The Secret Agent could have been trimmer and played less with these subsidiary thmes, but it wouild not have been Mendonça Filho's film. It was good enough this way for them to love it at Cannes, so they no only gave Walter Moura the Best Actor award, but gave Best Director to Mendonça Filho, the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Film in Competition, and the AFCAE Art House Cinema Award. This is the kind of film they love at festivals and if you love to analyze films you'll have a ball analyzing this. But I can understand how The Oscar Expert, who loved Sîrat as I did, was more doubtful about this film as an awards contender and "personally struggled" with it.

The Secret Agent/O Agente Secreto, 158 mins., debuted in competition at Cannes winning Best Director, Best Actor and other awards there, showing in many other international festivals, including New York, for which it is reviewed here. MMetacritic rating: 87%, but as the Oscar Expert bro pointed out, only a 3.8 on Letterboxd.

[Chris Knipp]

FRANCESCO SOSSAI: LAST ONE FOR THE ROAD (2025)

TRAILER (Italian)
FILM CLIP [subtitled}
INTERVIEW with Sossai by Dennis Lim at the NYFF

"Non c'è mai 'un'altra volta'" (There's never a 'next time')

Ingratiating and grating, profound and superficial. This film is all those things, and also a portrait or rough tour of Italy's Veneto region. The principals are amiable men, two blustery and heavy drinking fifty-somethings called Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano) and Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla) who somehow pick up a young architectural student, Giulio (prizewinning young actor Filippo Scotti of Sorrentino's The Hand of God) and take him along on their marathon drinking tour of the countryside.

Doriano and Carlobianchi reflect Italy's sense of failure, perhaps, but also its ways of coping. What could be more dolce far niente than their bar-hopping? The joke is they are forever pursuing their "last drink," though the American re-title is misleading. This film's original name is "Le città di pianura," "The Cities of the Plain." The sad fact is that it's a ravaged region, the Veneto, full of "plains" that are neither urban nor rural any more. Sossai is interested in both capturing an Italian mood and celebrating the architecture of the local region, whose beauties and unique features the Veneto pair is reminded of by Giulio, the boy from Naples who wants to go home to make a date with a girl next day, but gives up eventually and is drawn into his elder companions' curiously tempting misbehavior and ability to seize the moment because "there's never a 'next time' (non c'è mai un'altra volta").

Carlo Scarpa's architectural masterpiece, the tomb or rather "garden for the dead" for the Brion family in San Vito d'Altivole near Treviso is visited by the three at the prompting of Giulio, who has seen only the plans and is surprised how much more beautiful the actual place is.

Thomas Laffly in Variety points out that the film is "beautifully shot" on film stock, also that it provides an interwoven tale that shows us many different architectural structures, "mansions and modern buildings alike," and skillful interweavings of flashbacks with the present that show Sossai's "filmmaking panache". He suggests that the "effortlessly off-the-cuff rhythms" of the script recall Richard Linklater. There are references that range from the invention of the nostalgic wink at the nineties via speculation about the origins of the shrimp cocktail to an architect who died in Japan but is buried in the garden cemetery standing up "like a Samurai." This is an endlessly rich and ingenious film whose apparent meandering triviality --though some viewers may object to it-- is very deceptive. "When it all starts feeling a bit repetitive," Laffly writes, "a dash of suspense lifts up the movie with the trio teaming up for a petty con while sipping luscious daiquiris."

There is also a long con recounted from decades earlier of grabbing discarded eyeglasses from a factory and reselling them cheap, which becomes so profitable it becomes not a petty but a grand con, and their pal Genio (Andrea Pennacchi), the most heavily involved in it, fled to Argentina decades ago. It was to meet him on his return that they have gone to the wrong airport this morning. Later in the day they run into him, and he dodges them--a long tale that is verified, then thrown away, very typical of the writing here.

There is also the Count who shows the trio his villa, thinking they are the architects he is expecting to help him deal with a planned freeway that's going to destroy part of his property and all of his peace of mind. By this point Giulio has been drawn into the spirit of casual scam of the older men. And when one of them French kisses the Count, that's a scam too because he comes away with a fistful of euros. Have these two pals ever caseed being con men?

A passage from the Italian website Italy for Movies incorporating an interview with Francesco Sossai helps underline my point that this film is more about Italy and place than a bromance road movie about alcoholics, even though it's that too):

The protagonist is the Veneto region, a lost rural world
A story both local and universal [the La Repubblica review called it "deeply local and surprisingly universal"], filmed in various locations across the Veneto plain, between the provinces of Belluno and Treviso, in Sedico and the Feltre area , Padua and Chioggia, and even Venice . Places the director prefers to call earth rather than territory, a term he believes is overused and linked more to the concept of selling than to belonging. A semantic shift that speaks volumes about the fact that virtually nothing remains of rural Veneto, he emphasizes: “What you breathe in the countryside is an air of urban solitude. This is the main feeling I wanted to convey in the film; that of a countryside that is no longer countryside but has not yet become a city. To explore the soul of a region that has become a rich cemetery; everything not related to commodities is disappearing, ecosystems are polluted, old homes abandoned or destroyed in favor of characterless residential buildings. Peasant civilization belonged to a place, it was an emanation of the land itself. A form of life that permeated these spaces for long centuries is now gone. You could say I shot the film among the ruins of that Veneto.”

A Neopolitan hotel clerk in Rome once said to me, "Non è vero che l'Italia è il giardino del mondo, e Roma è il giardino d'Italia?", "Isn't it true that Italy is the garden of the world, and Rome is the garden of Italy?" Well, parts of that garden are purifying from within due to economic pressures and modernization. But the film is very region-specific, and names like Mestre and Treviso are not just local color.

This is one of those adorable films that has a bitter underside and a deceptive simplicity, but above all it's an engagingly casual interweaving of places and tales. If not one of the best internationally, it gets my vote for the year's best Italian film with international resonance, justifying its premiere at Un Certain Regard at Cannes and showings at Toronto and the New York Film Festival, as well as Mill Valley.

[I The Last One for the Road/Le città di pianura,[/I]100 mins. , May premiere Cannes in Un Certain Regard, showing also at TIFF and the NYFF. Theatrical release 23 Sept. 2025 Italy.

[Chris Knipp]

MOHAMED ALI ELYASMEHR, MAJID PANAHI, HADIS PAKBATEN IN IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT

JAFAR PANAHI: IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT (2025)

INTERVIEW WITH PANAHI AT LINCOLN CENTER BY MARTIN SCORSESE

Old complaints revisited

TRAILER

This feature film from renowned and beleaguered Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. In it a driver with a pregnant wife and young daughter has car trouble. The mechanic he seeks recognizes him as a prison torturer and captures him, then gathers fellow ex-prisoners to verify his identity and decide what to do with him. This tragicomic thriller takes Panahi's picture of the Iranian regime's victims to a new emotional intensity. The DIY feel, the story's own uncertainty of truth, only add to the memorably rough edges of this unique and remarkably visceral cry from the wilderness of dictatorship.

Not a very long film, this 24-hour span story has richness and layers. It's about the indelible memory of months or years of prison and torture, and it seems uniquely memorable for viewers. It begins when the at first nameless driver (Ebrahim Azizi) hits a dog. (Very typical of Iranian cinema for key action to be in a car.) HIs wife excuses him with "It was just an accident" and says it was God's will. Their young daughter is feisty (another Iranian film signature now--see Panahi's son Panah's Hit the Road) says this had nothing to do with God and "You killed a dog."

The driver finds a mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) who offers to do the repair. But Vahid does a double-take. He follows the car and captures the driver and takes him out to the desert tied up, and buries him. But then he has second thoughts. When he notices the man has a wooden leg, Vahid thinks this is Eqbal, "Peg-Leg" or "the Gimp", the man who tortured him for three months, causing permanent kidney damage, which now has got him the nickname "Jug Head" because of how he holds his body with pain. But then, Vahid isn't sure. He goes looking for another former prisoner he knows for confirmation that this is who he thinks it is.

This is the bookseller Salar (George Hashemzadeh). Once the secret has been imparted, Salar thinks Vahid is crazy to get involved in a revenge scheme and will have nothing to do with it. He sends Vahihd to Shiva (Mariam Afshari). Vahid finds Shiva at work photographing a bride and groom. It turns out she is, as she says, just beginning to live a "normal" life now, and she does not welcome Vahid's project. But she does, to the end.

Along the way there is drama, comedy, and some gibes at the society, particularly its predilection for receiving bribes. Vahid winds up taking his prisoner's pregnant wife to the hospital, where she gives birth to a boy, and the nurses require a payoff or bribe and pastries. Vahids scrambles, and has been fronted by the feisty daughter as the pregnant woman's uncle. The father is "busy" - tied up and incarcerated in the "uncle's" van. Later, when he and his new cohorts are looking suspicious around the van, Vahid is menaced by security guards, and must bribe them to look the other way, but has no cash. We are amused - or appalled - to learn that the guards carry a credit card reader to take bribes with.

Do Shiva and the others she leads Vahid to identify the man for Vahid? All of them were blindfolded when he tortured them, so it's a bit difficult. They must recognize him by his voice, by his smell, and by the clicking sound of his wooden leg - things partly creepy, partly visceral.

Shiva is the name of a powerful Hindu god, who can be an avenger on behalf of justice. Shiva herself, with her mannish photographer outfit and her close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, projects calm, maturity and composure. The bride and groom turn out to be of the fellowship too. The bride Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) has waves of nausea and is quite ill, doubtless an aftermath of torture. The groom is Ali (Majid Panahi). They go and get the tall and wild Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), who stages a disorderly fit right away. For this Vahid has come into town, with his prisoner tied up and in a closed compartment in the floor of his van.

Now they all go out to a remote desert whose little single tree reminds Hamid of Waiting for Godot.. There is a lot of disagreement about what to do, and Hamid, Goli, and Ali wind up leaving, but Shiva stays with Vahid. The uncertainty most of the way remains as to whether this man is Eqbal "Peg-Leg" whom Shiva calls "the Gimp" or not. Shiva insists this revenge plan of Vahid's is wrong in any case. This is not what they, who were peaceful demonstrators for freedom, would do. It is not who they are. Killing or torturing Peg-Leg, if that's who he is, would be taking on the methods of the enemy, of the dictators.

These questions are always on the table, while little funny, awkward things are also constantly happening. This film was shot in and around Tehran minimally, clandestinely and on the run, without official permission: Panahi has after all been forbidden by the Iranian regime to make movies. The effect of these circumstances is to add an edge of intensity. One thing follows closely after another (this is in the editing too, and there are one or two very neat cutting tricks). The raw, artisanal texture makes it feel more real than a slicker production would. There is a high level of tension. When I spoke of layers I was thinking of: awakening of the traumatic memories of imprisonment and torture, some of which are recalled in specific detail; the present question whether this really is the man they all hate but never actually saw; the issue of what, if so, they now should do; the sense of how absurd, unnecessary, useless, and dangerous all this is.

For a while, we're living it with them. This film is a process, not an event. You had to be there? Well, we are there. That's what Panahi achieves. Is this a film for everyone? No. But it's a significant Iranian film with a wry satirical bite.

It Was Just an Accident یک تصادف ساده ("A Simple Coincidence"), 105 mins.,, premiered at Cannes May 2025 winning the Palme d'Or. It has been included in over two dozen other international festivals including Locarno, Telluride, Toronto, Mill Valley and the New York Film Festival, showing at the latter Oct. 2, 2025. Opening in US theaters starting Oct. 15. (San Francisco Oct. 24.) Metacritic rating: 89%.

[Chris Knipp]

MARGARET QUALLEY, ETHAN HAWKE IN BLUE MOON

RICHARD LINKLATER: BLUE MOON (2025) (SPOTLIGHT SERIES)

Everything happens to me

Lyricist Lorenz Hart’s legendary contribution to the Great American Songbook with with composer Richard Rodgers include My Funny Valentine, The Lady Is a Tramp, Where or When, With a Song in My Heart, Isn't It Romantic?, My Heart Stood Still, Bewitched, I Didn't Know What Time It Was, Manhattan, and Blue Moon. But at the moment in 1943 that's the focus of this incredibly vivid and touching film portrait, that marriage was on the rocks and Hart was soon to die of pneumonia a victim of alcoholism. Here he is, in Richard Linklater's film in a performance by Ethan Hawke as Hart drinking and monologuing at Sardi's after Rogers' huge success collaborating with Oscar Hammerstein on Oklahoma! has left him in the cold. It's an astonishing tour de force by Hawke and a rich, sad but brilliant portrait of a man and a moment.

Richard Linklater’s luminous, erudite drama imagines a loquacious Hart (an astonishing tour de force by Ethan Hawke) on the night of Oklahoma!’s premiere, holed up at Sardi’s and moving through various stages of grief and acceptance—and blistering wit—when faced with Broadway’s new world order.


Also featuring stellar supporting work from Andrew Scott (who won the Silver Bear for best supporting performance at the Berlinale), Margaret Qualley, and Bobby Cannavale, Blue Moon is a surprising yet entirely fitting addition to the Linklater canon: a film about the inevitable passage of time and the feeling of being left behind by those stuck in its folds. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Hollywood Reporter review by David Rooney at the Berlinale premiere Feb. 2025.

[Chris Knipp]

LEONARDO DICAPRIO IN ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON: ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (2025)

TRAILER
NYFF Q&A

A serious comedy of love and fury in a world out of whack

Paul Thomas Anderson's spectacularly accomplished and propulsive film is about dispersed Sixties-style radicals and racist right wingers and their attraction and repulsion towards each other. It is also about childrearing, and family love. Well, hell, it's about a lot of things, some of them totally relevant today, and individual audience members will determine what it's most about for now and for themselves. After seeing the film late enough for the fiercely loyal critical response to be clear, but seeing also how the political material could be polarizing, one has to wonder how this opening weekend will go and whether One Battle After Another will have legs and if it will prove as big a success with the public as it is with the savants, thereby paving the way for major accolades at awards time.

This is a beautifully made and wonderfully acted film shot in Vista Vision, a classic format, on 35 (and 70) mm. film but in a contemporary style with a lot of closeups and rough, kinetic handheld footage and lots of faces seen intimately. It's almost continual action, which can be bad, but Anderson handles it so well the long runtime is hardly noticeable if you're really paying attention.

The film is adapted from, or rather "inspired by," a novel by Thomas Pynchon. You can hear the rarely heard voice of Pynchon advertising his novel Inherent Vice here. That was the first Pynchon novel adapted by PT Anderson (in 2014; see my review of it). This is the second, out of his ten films, to be a Pynchon adaptation, so I guess we can say PTA is a pretty big fan of this writer..

Interestingly, a new novel by Pynchon, Shadow Ticket, probably his last, given that he is now 88, is scheduled to appear on October 7th. This film is "inspired by" the third of Pynchon's nine published novels, Vineland, published in 1990. This said, I'm not a Pynchon fan and have read nothing by him. But we can find out a bit about him on the internet: he has fans there. They seem to think Vineland is a lesser novel than Inherent Vice, a generally lightweight and accessible one, maybe one we average folk can love more.

In a positive review of Vineland in the NYTimes when it came out in 1990 by none other than Salmon Rushdie he described it as "that rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years." He goes on to describe its tone: "as Thomas Pynchon turns his attention to the nightmares of the present rather than the past, his touch becomes lighter, funnier, more deadly." More encouragingly, Rushdie emphasizes in the book "that aforementioned hint of redemption, because this time entropy is not the only counterweight to power; community, it is suggested, might be another, and individuality, and family."

The complicated plot of Vineland isn't carried over to Anderson's One Battle After Another the way Pynchon's Inherent Vice's was to his same-titled film, but those themes are here, and also the element of a right winger (Sean Penn's semi-comical Col. Steven J. Lockjaw) and Teyana Taylor's scarily intense and sexy female revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills being attracted, Perfidia's turning informer, then eventually, indifferent to motherhood, disappearing from witness protection and not seen again.

Vineland is full of flashbacks; the movie isn't. The movie begins instead sixteen years ago with an impressive highly organized raid by radicals on an ICE detention center and freeing of the detainees. After Perfidia disappears, Pat, aka Ghetto Pat, aka Rocket Man, Leonardo DiCaprio's wonderful disheveled revolutionary character, in drunken and stoner retirement now known as Bob Ferguson, raises up Perfidia's baby daughter Charlene, now called Willa (strong newcomer Chase Infiniti). Then Col. Lockjaw returns with mercenaries to raid the Pacific Northwest sanctuary town of Baktan Cro where Bob and Willa live.

DiCaprio's Bob is one of the richest and most engaging movie characters in years; he's been compared to "The Dude" in The Big Lebowski as has his Pynchon source character. As a radical explosives expert he was bold and intense, a daredevil driver, yet considered a bit of a washout to radical purists. Now he is spectacularly, almost comically paranoid - but of course he has every right to be. Willa just doesn't know that, because the heyday of Bob and Perfidia's radical group the French 75 and the counter-ICE raid of the opening scene all happened before Willa was around. When Co. Lockjaw's henchmen come, French 75 allies are on the job to rescue Willa, but then Bob goes in search of her.

Benicio Del Toro makes an especially suave and soothing presence here as Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, known to all simply as "Sensei," who is Willa's karate instructor but also a key figure in a local system to hide and protect undocumented people. Penn, DiCaprio and Del Toro all bounce Anderson's serious satirical comedy off each other.

Bob is furious - this is a running joke - because on the phone the French 75 operative, evidently someone young and new and a stickler for the rules, won't tell him where Willa has been taken because he can't remember the end of the series of passwords, "What time is it?" Do any of us know what time it is? Is it too late? Bob's worn down by so many years of getting wasted all day, he's weakened. And fleeing behind three youngsters, he does well, till he falls.

But after one of the most memorable of many memorable sequences, a car chase over rolling hills that roll so deep you can't see over the horizon or behind you, there is, for family, a happy ending. For Col. Lockjaw, there is a comeuppance so quietly chilling it virtually slithers by us. Some of Bob's fury is everyone's frustration with all that anyone over thirty struggles with about the changing world, from which button tap works the smartphone flash to the secret phrase that will save one's daughter.

There is very much to cherish and ponder in this, one of PTA's best films, more conventionally audience-pleasing than either the complicated Inherent Vice or the ho-hum Licorice Pizza. This one crosses swords with more conventional blockbusters here but by doing so it shows how utterly different and individual it is compared to them. Dr. Strangelove has been mentioned. In Col. Lockjaw you may see a shakier version of Kubrick's Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket. Anderson may not be taking so clear a stand as Kubrick did. But ask yourself: are we meant to despise the French 75 for raiding that detention center?

My feelings as so often lately are mixed about Jonny Greenwood's very up-to-date style and confident score. Its pulsating intensity is essential to the rhythm and focus, it works brilliantly to link the fast edits, but when music drowns out dialogue it has stepped out of line. Can you make a thriller that's silent? Yes, you can. Watch the 35-minute jewelry store burglary sequence (sample) in Jules Dassin's Rififi and see what pure focus on an action can be like.

One Battle After Another, 161 mins., opened in US theaters Sept. 26, 2025. Metacriticrating: 95%. The AlloCiné press rating (French critics) is. 4/7 out of 5.0, i.e., 95%.