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Here, America is presented in all its rotten glory, a battleground of violence between revolutionaries and those in power. The accuracy will shake you to your core.

One Battle After Another finds the director at the peak of his power and is sure to be an awards contender.

So many “films of our moment” have felt angry or cynical, but Anderson’s movie transcends that by being human and even offering optimism.

For all of One Battle After Another’s formalist pleasures – its humour, its pace, its grandeur – what feels the most striking about it, in this apocalyptic now, is the hope that it chooses to leave us with.

The rumours that Paul Thomas Anderson has made one of the best films of the 21st century are, y’know, ever so slightly exaggerated. However, the man who has already made one of the best films of the 21st century (There Will be Blood) has directed the coolest, most consummately masterful movie you’re likely to see all year. And its got Oscars glory just oozing out of every frame.

Creating characters who manage to pull through no matter their circumstances is one of Anderson’s many specialties, but here he seems to evolve that into something more personal. Even with the intensity in the film that stems from America’s most insidious institutions and the people who run them, there is a sense of hope and a revolutionary spirit that runs through it all.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark comedy One Battle After Another turns overreaching into an art form.

In a decade or two when the great New Hollywood directors of the 1970s are gone, Anderson might be the greatest living American director. One of Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood or Phantom Thread would be enough for most careers, but excellence is almost routine for PTA. His remarkable quality control remains intact with this formidable piece of work.

It’s a stoner movie about an ex-freedom fighter trying to save his daughter amidst a marijuana-addled haze. It’s also a freedom fighting movie in which the true heroes risk the lives of innocent people just to save that one stoner guy a bunch of times. Perhaps if “One Battle After Another” were more focused, or just shorter, Anderson’s message could have been clearer.

With One Battle After Another, Anderson seems to have distilled decades of pent-up rage regarding societal decay; poignant ideas about the collective necessity to revolt and how oppositional forces aim to stunt a resistance’s growth by any means necessary; and the long-gestating blueprint for his ideal action blockbuster into a wise, exhilarating, and frequently hysterical epic that meets the moment head-on with one bash to the skull after another. Bracing and concussive, it’s a film that would be the defining work of most filmmakers’ careers, a notion that only warrants debate given how many masterpieces Anderson had made before this one...

[T]his propulsive, hilarious, and overwhelmingly tender paranoid comedy-thriller car chase blockbuster whatever doesn’t just stare a broken country in the face with its already prescient tale of immigrant detention centers, white nationalist caricatures, and bullshit pretenses for deploying the military into sanctuary cities. It’s also the first movie of its size to accurately crystallize how fucking anxious it feels to be alive right now — to capture the IMAX cartoonishness of our reality and provide a convincing roadmap as to how we might survive it.

This audacious action-thriller is the filmmaker’s most purely entertaining vehicle, but underneath its adrenalised set pieces are quieter concerns about how best to make lasting change in a corrupt world.