Key takeaways

• Some critics say that Oscar-buzzy films like One Battle After Another and After the Hunt don’t go far enough in their political commentary, which speaks to a growing expectation for straightforward and instructive takeaways.
• Finding hot takes in films is well suited for online political debate, but it’s not the best way to get the most out of watching a movie.
• While films explicitly about politics used to be common in Hollywood, the genre has dwindled in the Trump era, as movies expressing political dissent are under threat.
• The right claims that any mainstream movie with diverse characters or feminist storylines is liberal propaganda — another sign that internet discourse demands movies to take sides in a culture war.

One Battle After Another is, perhaps, too on the nose. Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic depicts past and present revolutionaries fighting back against a heavily militarized, white-supremacist regime that seemed to mirror reality in the United States when the movie hit theaters in late 2025. Characters rescue immigrants from detention centers, bomb the office of an anti-abortion politician, and engage in explosive standoffs with the police.

But according to its auteur, One Battle After Another is not a manifesto. Nor was the script, which he started working on two decades ago, intended to challenge the particular moment. The film is loosely based on the 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, a dark satire set just after Reagan’s reelection. Anderson has said that the film depicts the timeless nature of fascism but that he was more focused on the journey of its characters. He hasn’t credited Trump as an inspiration for the film.

“The biggest mistake I could make in a story like this is to put politics up in the front,” Anderson told the Los Angeles Times.

Still, questions over whether One Battle After Another is radical enough persist online. It’s just another example of a growing tendency for audiences to pigeonhole films politically, regardless of their text or the filmmaker’s intent. People expect a straightforward and instructive political message and then judge the work by that metric.

Art, of course, can be a powerful........

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