At the movies (I)

Reflections on One Battle After Another, Hedda, Marty Supreme, and Father, Mother, Sister, Brother

Jan 14, 2026

Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘One Battle After Another’

In my house, wintertime is moviegoing time. What follows are reflections on four films I saw over the last few weeks – all but one in movie theaters. Based in Hudson, N.Y., as I am, I have access to a wealth of independent cinemas and arthouses, one a five-minute walk from my house, several others just a short five-to-30 minute drive away. While I love watching movies at home – and home-viewing has plenty of advantages over seeing films in theaters -- I’ve greatly enjoyed reconnecting with the experience of going to the movies and seeing them as they were intended to be seen.

One Battle After Another – When I came to the end of One Battle After Another – directed by Paul Thomas Anderson – I thought to myself, “Wow. When did they stop making movies like this?” I thought it was pretty great the first time around. I even liked Leonardo DiCaprio, who has never fully won me over. But I loved his portrayal of an aging, dissolute former hippie revolutionary. There is more than a faint whiff of Jeff Bridges’ title character aka “The Dude” from The Big Lebowski in DiCaprio’s character, “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun aka Bob Ferguson. Not an imitation, but a tribute to the long shadow cast by Bridges in that all-time memorable role.

There were a lot of other great performances in One Battle, especially Sean Penn’s sadistic yet vulnerable Col. Steven J. Lockjaw. If any single actor in this film is deserving of an acting award, it’s Penn. Not that I put any stock in awards. Just the mere fact that the Golden Globes gave Battle the award for Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical proves that award shows are pretty moronic. The movie is definitely no musical, and as for it being a comedy … well, there are comic moments, undoubtedly, but most of those grow out of satire, which is not the same as comedy.

Anyway, other performances of note – and they really all are performances of note – include Teyana Taylor as Perfidia Beverly Hills, Benicio del Toro as Sergio St. Carlos, who is both sensei and killer, and the revelatory Chase Infiniti, the daughter of Ferguson and Perfidia Beverly Hills and a chip off both blocks, making her feature film debut here. Infiniti is already set to star in The Testaments, a sequel series to Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, quite a juicy prospect. (Don’t blink in the first five or 10 minutes of the film or you’ll miss a cameo by Alana Haim.)

One Battle After Another is so many movies in one. It’s a thriller, an action film, a mystery, a political satire, and a counterculture caper. It’s adapted from a Thomas Pynchon novel called Vineland, but I know nothing of the source material so I can’t comment on that, other than to say you certainly don’t need any familiarity with it to understand or appreciate the story that Anderson has put on screen.

Kudos once again to Jonny Greenwood, who must be the busiest film composer in Hollywood, and who in his spare time plays guitar in a band called Radiohead – you may have heard of them. Greenwood is in love with all kinds of sounds, and he composes as much with sounds as he does with conventional musical notation and instruments.

Most of all, though, One Battle After Another is a love story – a beautiful father-daughter love story, full of dysfunction but ultimately transcendent, as it plays out against the chaos and violence happening all around. It could even be a tonic for these terrible times.

One final note: As I wrote up top, I thought One Battle After Another was pretty great the first time around. I watched it a second time just a couple weeks later, and it did not knock me out as much as it did the first time. I often find that on repeated watch movies (and TV shows) get better. Perhaps it’s Anderson’s dizzying spiral of action and emotion that hits so hard upon first viewing, and with the elements of shock and surprise gone, it doesn’t have the same impact. I’d like to view One Battle After Another again in a year or so to see how it holds up.

Marty Supreme -- I have never been a fan of Timothée Chalamet. I don’t think he is a bad actor per se (except for his dubious portrayal of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown); I just am not blown away by him as so many others are, and his ever-growing popularity is a total mystery to me. But Chalamet handles the lead role of table-tennis hustler Marty Reisman in the latest Josh Safdie with aplomb. It’s a gem of a role, an actor’s dream, and the combination of hustler Marty Reisman’s antic hijinks and Safdie’s trademark frenetic style makes for an energetic, fast-paced movie; my moviegoing partner suggested it was basically Uncut Gems (directed by the Safdie brothers) with ping-pong instead of jewelry, and I agree wholeheartedly. Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Uncut Gems was pretty madcap, as is Marty Supreme.

A few other performances stand out, including that of Tyler, the Creator, in his first cinematic starring role, performing ably as Reisman’s dutiful sidekick, and Odessa A’zion, as Rachel, Reisman’s childhood best friend and occasional illicit lover, is offbeat and alluring – expect to see more of her in years to come. One false note, however, is Gwyneth Paltrow as a high-society socialite (and fading Hollywood starlet) as Reisman’s love interest. It’s no fault of Paltrow’s, but – casting aside – that relationship defies credulity in a script that needs to adhere to a minimum level of believability in order to be fully, emotionally convincing. I remain unconvinced.

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Hedda – In this heavily adapted version of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, relocated to a country estate in 1950s England, Tessa Thompson, portraying the title character, is given one note to play – call it “bourgeois ennui” – and she plays it well. But she only fully comes alive in her intimate scenes with Nina Hoss, who plays Hedda’s former lover who is now an academic rival of Hedda’s husband, in competition with him for a promotion. Hoss is fascinating and complex, where the rest of the movie is just yet another gossipy exposé of rich people behaving badly. Movies like this bring out the latent Marxist in me; I pretty much hate all the characters and the setting from the outset. While there are a few fireworks in the plot, there’s not enough to blow the whole place to smithereens, which would have been a more justifiable ending. But that’s just me.

Father Mother Sister Brother: Director Jim Jarmusch’s latest film recalls some of his more minimalist, early works (think Paterson and Coffee and Cigarettes). It’s an “anthology” film, with three different stories featuring different casts and settings, tied together by a focus on adult children and their aging or estranged parents. The cast is amazing: Tom Waits returns to the fold as a deceptive old coot who is paid a visit by his adult children, perfectly realized by Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik. Over the course of their short visit to their dad’s cabin in the woods where he seemingly lives off the grid, they get small glimpses of a secret life he hides from them. The middle story takes place in Dublin, where a matriarch, played by the divine Charlotte Rampling, is visited by her two grown daughters – one played by Cate Blanchett in one of her magical “disappearing into the character”-style roles. The final story brings a brother and sister together to their parents’ apartment in Paris, which they need to clear out after their mother and father die in an airplane crash. Once again, they learn things about their parents they never knew. Overall the movie is quiet and modest (in spite of the star power of the performers), but unlike so many mainstream films, it never talks down to the viewer. Rather, it invites you in, and since you are likely to have some familiarity with how different families deal with secrets, you get hooked. I’d rather get hooked by a psychodrama than beaten over the head by a fancy dress-up gala any day of the week.

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