“American Psycho” author Bret Easton Ellis is calling out the acclaimed critical response to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” which is the highest-rated film of 2025 on Metacritic so far with a 95 score. While Ellis is a big fan of Anderson (he said “There Will Be Blood” is “maybe the best film of this century,” for example), the author claimed critics have heaped praise on “One Battle After Another” because the film’s politics align with the left.
“It’s kind of shocking to see these kind of accolades for — I’m sorry, it’s not a very good movie — because of its political ideology, and it’s so obvious that’s what they’re responding to,” Ellis said on “The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast” (via MovieMaker) about the critical reaction to Anderson’s latest. “Why it’s considered a masterpiece, the greatest film of the decade, the greatest film ever made [is] because it really aligns with this kind of leftist sensibility.”
Ellis predicted the movie will soon be seen as “a kind of musty relic of the post-Kamala Harris era — that thing everyone gathers around and pretends is so fantastic and so great when it really isn’t, just to make a point… There’s a liberal mustiness to this movie that already feels very dated by October 2025. Very dated. And it just doesn’t read the room. You know, it reads a tiny corner of the room, but it does not read what is going on in America.”
Responding to one film critic who called “One Battle After Another” an “important” movie, Ellise responded: “No, it is not. It has really not read the room. It has not read the room at all about what’s going on in America.”
Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” “One Battle After Another” stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a washed up revolutionary who is forced to come out of hiding when an old enemy takes an interest in locating his daughter (breakout newcomer Chase Infiniti). The cast includes Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor, all of whom have Oscar buzz in addition to DiCaprio, Infiniti and Anderson amid the rave reviews.
Variety’s Owen Gleiberman raved about the film in his review, calling it a “mesmerizing vision of a police-state America.”
“‘One Battle After Another’ is a movie that taps into the fierce urgency of now; it gives you a chill that’s also a wake-up call… while it speaks with a big vision to the danger and anxiety of our moment, it’s also a drama that’s totally grounded and relatable,” Gleiberman wrote. “‘One Battle After Another’ is a vision of a society in captivity, but it’s a movie that never loses the pulse of its humanity.”
Since opening in theaters on Sept. 26, “One Battle After Another” has earned $114 million and counting at the worldwide box office. It is the first film directed by Anderson to cross the $100 million benchmark.
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