Licorice Pizza

One Battle After Another

04/10/25

Cineworld, Edinburgh

We’re uncharacteristically late to this one, mostly because in its week of release we are in a camper-van in the wilds of Scotland and no cinema in that vicinity is showing it. Not complaining, you understand, people need to have holidays, but this is a film by Paul Thomas Anderson, whom I’ve held in special esteem ever since watching Boogie Nights way back in 1997. And all those ‘best film of the year’ reports make me impatient to get back to civilisation.

Mind you, I’d be the first to admit that, in recent years, PTA has (at least for me) gone off the boil a bit. Unlike many of his followers, I didn’t really care for 2017’s Phantom Thread and his last offering, 2021’s Licorice Pizza, though a warm and appealing slice of nostalgia, wasn’t the finest work from the director of There Will be Blood and (in my humble opinion) his masterpiece, Magnolia.

One Battle After Another, as the name suggests, is an action film, perhaps the last genre I’d have expected this most enigmatic of film-makers to explore but, happily, he puts his own unique spin on it, producing a sprawling, multi-faceted tale set over the best part of two decades. It’s larger than life, peopled by a series of eccentrically-named caricatures and yet, once it settles into its stride, it manages to exert a powerful grip.

We first join the action as Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), along with other members of their far-left terrorist group, French 75, launch an armed attack on a detention centre in California and free all of the captives. During the action, Perfidia encounters the unit’s commanding officer, Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), and – in a move intended to humiliate him – makes him masturbate at gunpoint. However, this only causes him to fixate on her, something that will have inevitable consequences further down the line.

Pat and Perfidia become partners, but their haphazard attempts to parent their baby daughter, Willa, seem doomed to failure – especially when Perfidia is captured and forced into witness protection, and Pat is left to deal with the situation alone.

Sixteen years later, Willa (Chase Infiniti) has grown to be an independent teenager, preferring to follow the guidance of her karate instructor, Sergio (an underused Benicio Del Toro), than her drug-addled old man. Pat hasn’t been involved in any terrorist activity in years, preferring to experiment with every drug he can lay his hands on but when, out of the blue, a coded telephone call reaches him, announcing that Lockjaw (now a Colonel) is coming after Willa, he’s forced to get up off the sofa and go to her aid…

From this point, the film pretty much delivers on the promise of the title – it’s a frenetic, explosive and breathless chase filtered through cinematographer Michael Bauman’s VistaVision lenses, and backed by Jonny Greenwood’s eccentric score. Written by Anderson and loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Vineland, the director has reputedly been working on this project for something like 20 years so it’s remarkable that it feels as timely as it does.

DiCaprio is wonderfully endearing as the hapless Pat, desperately trying to remember passwords that he hasn’t used for far too long, while Penn, as the heinous, macho Lockjaw, is the personification of a living GI Joe action figure, a man committed to preserving his outward appearance, while inside he’s a festering, ambitious wreck. But strangely, it’s newcomer Infiniti who really impresses here as the quietly determined Willa, who, when pushed, snaps back with the stubborn tenacity she’s inherited from her mother.

One Battle After Another is a searing condemnation of contemporary America, a world where freedom has to be fought for with extreme violence, where the most cold-blooded assassins hide behind the personas of smiling, corn-fed patriots. PTA finds original ways to explore the most well-worn conventions. Even the old fall-back of the car chase is given a mesmerising makeover, as vehicles glide silently through a shimmering waterfall of desert roads like some kind of LSD-induced hallucination.

Despite a hefty running time of two hours and 41 minutes, the film flashes by in what feels like half that time and it’s clear pretty much from the outset that Paul Thomas Anderson is back on form. Whatever comes next, I’m already looking forward to it.

4.8 stars

Philip Caveney

The Long Walk

14/09/25

Cineworld, Edinburgh

As I’ve observed elsewhere, Stephen King is one of the most screen-adapted authors in living history and you’d think, wouldn’t you, that by now they’d have run out of titles to turn into movies? I mean, what stone has been left unturned? Well, there’s always The Long Walk, a story about a dystopian future where young men enter a lottery in order to be able to compete in a gruelling competition – where the winner will be handed a fortune while losers will be eliminated one by one, with a well-aimed bullet.

And before people start muttering about this being ripped off from The Hunger Games, it’s worth mentioning that King wrote the original novel when he was seventeen and that it was published way back in 1979, under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. (Bachman also wrote The Running Man, already filmed in 1987 starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, with a new version looming on the cinematic horizon.)

The competitor we’re rooting for in the titular ordeal is Raymond Garrity (Cooper Hoffman) and the guy he pals up with is Peter McVries (David Jonsson) – but there are plenty of other participants and we learn something about most of them by the time we approach the three-hundred-mile marker. The event is presided over by The Major (an almost unrecognisable Mark Hamill). As the walk progresses, we witness some truly horrible executions and some almost as awful depictions of what happens when the participants are not even allowed the luxury of a toilet break…

The danger here, of course, is that such a stripped-back storyline might mean that the narrative becomes repetitive, so kudos must go to director Francis Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner, who somehow manage to incorporate enough gear changes to keep me thoroughly entertained (if that’s the right word) throughout a one hour and forty-eight minute run time. It’s also chilling to note that, with the current political upheaval in the USA, the premise of this story feels queasily credible.

More than anything else, this is a film about male friendship, about honour and sacrifice. Hoffman, who made such a confident debut in Licorice Pizza is quietly compelling here as a young man nurturing a secret thirst for vengeance, while Jonsson makes the perfect foil for him: relaxed, compassionate and nurturing. As I say, we do learn about several of the other competitors, but this film belongs to its central duo, who keep us walking alongside them right up to the shattering conclusion.

4.2 stars

Philip Caveney

Licorice Pizza

03/01/22

Cameo Cinema, Edinburgh

Paul Thomas Anderson has directed some of my all-time favourite films.

Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood are all gems, a triumvirate that any filmmaker would be proud to leave as a cinematic legacy. But more recently, his work has underwhelmed me. Inherent Vice (2014) was an incoherent mess and 2017’s Phantom Thread – though wildly acclaimed by many critics – left me curiously unmoved.

On the face of it then, Licorice Pizza feels like a return to his comfort zone, exploring the sleazy canyons of the San Fernando Valley in the early 70s, an era that yielded such delights in Boogie Nights. This is the story of Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), a supremely confident fifteen-year-old child ‘actor’ and all- round entrepreneur, with an extended family working to his orders on a variety of different projects. While it quickly becomes clear that Gary may be overestimating his own genius, he seems to have convinced a surprising number of others to give his projects a whirl.

Then, out of the blue, he falls in love at first sight with Alana (Alana Haim) who is twenty-five and makes no bones about telling Gary that he hasn’t a hope in hell of ending up with her. (This age thing, by the way, feels needlessly controversial. Hoffman’s actual age is eighteen and Haim thirty, so it would have had the same dynamic if they’d simply nudged Gary’s age up a year or so. Just saying.)

Despite Alana’s protestations, something sticks and she agrees to meet him for a drink. Soon enough, she becomes his loyal sidekick (although she’s insistent that they’re just friends), and he’s trying to get her into the movies…

What follows is an exuberant scramble of a film, as Gary and Alana run (and I mean literally) all around the valley, struggling through the ups and downs of an on/off relationship, while Gary tries out his madcap enterprises, setting himself up as a purveyor of waterbeds and – when the oncoming fuel crisis puts the kibosh on that – relaunching himself as the owner of a pinball arcade. The anarchic sprawl that ensues in that emporium probably mirrors the kind of youthful carnage that was played out in the Licorice Pizza record stores from which the film takes its name. – but that’s just my best guess.

Along the way, the duo encounter ageing action-movie star, Jack Holden (Sean Penn), desperate to impress Alana with an impromptu motorbike stunt, and terrifying coke freak Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper) who urgently wants to purchase a water bed for his wife, Barbara Streisand! Watch out too for a sensational cameo from Harriet Samsom Harris as Gary’s agent, Mary Grady, who delivers an object lesson in how to make the most of limited screen time.

This is a kinetic, adrenalin-fuelled movie, pushed along by bold, swooping cinematography and a no-holds-barred 70s soundtrack. Hoffman (the son of Anderson’s old muse, Philip Seymour Hoffman) is terrific as Gary and has great chemistry with Haim. She is, of course, a member of the rock trio that bears her name (for whom Anderson has shot several videos) and, as if to emphasise the ‘home movie’ feel of the project, Haim’s sisters – and even her parents – have supporting roles to play in this story.

While Licorice Pizza can’t claim to be up there with the very best of Anderson’s films, it nevertheless delivers a thoroughly enjoyable ride as Gary and Alana run side-by-side and finally – inevitably- towards each other. I fully expect to see its two stars going on to greater things.

And for Paul Thomas Anderson, this is definitely a step in the right direction.

4 stars

Philip Caveney