Rejoice! Paul Thomas Anderson has saved cinema! Okay, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but his new film, One Battle After Another, is a breakthrough. As though it were 1975 and not 2025, Warner Bros. took an auteur, gave him free rein and a big budget, and said, “Do your thing.” And man, did PTA do his thing.

At nearly three hours long, the film is a roller coaster ride—literally and figuratively. It’s exciting, funny, audacious, and politically trenchant. As is his wont, Anderson borrows a lot from Robert Altman and a bit from Stanley Kubrick, while in this case throwing in a touch of Quentin Tarantino and even Wes Anderson. The film is also loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Vineland, but it’s a creation all of PTA’s own—a combination of the kind of loosey-goosey, shaggy film style he demonstrated in Inherent Vice and Licorice Pizza with the disciplined craft of Phantom Thread and There Will Be Blood. In other words, the auteur is firing on all cylinders. It doesn’t hurt that he has Leonardo DiCaprio, America’s best living actor as his lead. (Fight me!)

DiCaprio plays “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, a reluctant member of a resistance group called The French 75. He’s an explosive expert—good at creating diversions—but he’s not a committed revolutionary. He’s tagging along with his lady, the fierce true believer, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). When she gets pregnant, he wants to slow things down a bit, settle into a domestic life, but she wants no part of it. Her devotion to the cause—various causes in this case, mostly involving protecting immigrants from inhumane treatment at the hands of an ICE-like agency—is too deep. One of the most memorable images of the film is Perfidia, extremely pregnant with her belly on full display, shooting a machine gun. “Bitch, I feel like Tony Montana!” she shouts.

Fast forward 16 years later and “Ghetto” Pat, now in hiding and going by the name Bob, is raising their daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti) on his own. By his own admission, his brain has been fried by drugs and alcohol, but even in his desiccated state, he’s a protective and devoted father. (He even tries to understand the pronouns of Willa’s nonbinary friend. “They, them, Dad,” Willa sighs. “Why is that so hard?”)

Trouble comes in the form of Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a sadistic military man who had an encounter with Perfidia years earlier and has become dangerously obsessed with her. He is now being recruited by a powerful, cloak-and-dagger white supremacist group called the Christmas Adventurers Club (“Hail St. Nick!” is their greeting) and needs to find Bob and Willa to tie up some loose ends from his past.

Bob has no desire to get back in the game, but when Lockjaw kidnaps Willa, he goes into dad-bod Rambo mode. Sporting a bad goatee and a flannel robe—soon to be as iconic as The Dude’s Pendleton sweater—and carrying a 1G (and therefore untraceable) phone that is desperately in need of a charge, he goes after her.

He gets help from the super Zen local karate teacher known as Sensei (Benicio Del Toro) who also runs a so-called “Underground Railroad” for Latin immigrants. (The vastness of Sensei’s network will prove to be useful to Bob down the road.)

Anderson is dealing with larger-than-life archetypes here. Bob is the hapless father desperate to find his daughter, played by DiCaprio with a hilarious franticness and touching pathos. Sensei is the unflappable resistance leader, brought to life by an effortlessly cool Del Toro. Lockjaw, played by Penn with a bow-legged gait and a maniacal look in his eyes, is the perverse villain. Dazzling newcomer Chase Infiniti is the beautiful, free-spirited daughter with more than a touch of her mother’s moxie and defiance. Regina Hall also memorably plays a member of the French 75 who is as committed as Perfidia but with a gentler touch.

It’s impossible to overstate how much fun this thing is, with twists and welcome detours along the way. And the filmmaking! Such verve. Such confidence. Whether Anderson is filming that already famous undulating chase scene, following Bob’s desperate attempt to charge his phone through the chaos, or showing us that top secret Christmas Adventurers Club with their Patagonia Vests and smug bonhomie, you know you’re in the hands of a master.

Movies are so back, baby!

Oh man, Little could’ve been big. All the components are there: a truly stellar cast, led by Regina Hall, Issa Rae, and the preternaturally precocious Marsai Martin. A cute concept: Boss from hell gets magically turned back into her 13-year-old self, and must come to terms with why she became such a jerk in the first place. Fun fashion, cheery sets, beautiful people. Even a feel-good real life origin story: It was young Martin who pitched the concept—a clever reverse take on the Tom Hanks vehicle Big—to the studio and serves as one of the film’s executive producers.

But I’m afraid to say that Little is something of a hot mess. Granted, an intermittently entertaining mess, but a mess all the same. Storylines are introduced and go nowhere, conspicuous continuity errors abound, bad jokes land with a thud, and character motivations are sketchy at best. I sense this is one of those films that was taken apart and entirely stitched back together in an editing room, which happens more often than you might think. The thing is, we’re not supposed to notice the seams.

When we first meet Jordan (Martin), she’s enthusiastically showcasing a science project at a middle school assembly. A mean girl heckles, then humiliates her. Jordan ends up both injured and mortified—and vows to never allow herself to be vulnerable again.

Fast forward 25 years and Jordan (Hall) is now the millionaire owner of an app development company who makes Miranda Priestly seems like the boss of the year. She’s bullying, demanding, and committed to making her workplace a joy free zone (she doesn’t even allow carbs in the office). Her employees, including her put-upon personal assistant April (Rae), fear and loathe her. One day, she’s mean to a little girl who’s a budding magician and the child puts a spell on her: “I wish you were little!” she shouts.

Suddenly, our glamorous, Ferrari-driving Jordan is a geeky tweenage girl with messy hair, glasses, and bad fashion. She also must rely on April—the only person who knows what happened—to help her navigate her new identity.

So far so good, right? But here’s where the movie goes wrong. A visit from child social services means Jordan must go back to school—the horror!—where she inappropriately flirts with a dreamy teacher (Justin Hartley) and meets three sweet, nerdy kids, who embrace her into their band of cafeteria outcasts. But the school scenes—essentially the crux of the whole film—are woefully underwritten. “Young” Jordan has no arc. She likes the nerdy kids and they like her right back. Even once she goes on a shopping spree and comes back to school looking fierce and fabulous, gaining the approval of this generation’s mean girl, she doesn’t dump her new squad, as you might expect. Instead, she takes them back to her fabulous apartment and they have a party, with lots of fashion changes, silly poses, and Instagram selfies. Fun, yes. But who is this person? The adult Jordan we met was never this fun or this kind. It seems that Jordan internalized the important lesson of the film—that you can be both successful and good without dimming your shine—through osmosis.

The film’s most cringy moment occurs when April takes Jordan to a restaurant. April is guzzling rosé, which Jordan wants to drink but April tells her she can’t, for obvious reasons. The next thing you know, Jordan is on the bar singing karaoke, obviously drunk. My first guess, which many others speculated about on Twitter, was that the MPAA ratings board wouldn’t allow us to see a 13 year old drink in a PG-13 rated film—hence the herky jerky editing. There had to be a better way around this.

That scene is directly followed by another one that is nearly as cringy. Jordan’s sexy boy toy (Luke James) breaks into her condo and does an erotic dance as April and young Jordan watch with a mixture of amusement and shock. When the boy toy discovers Jordan, he assumes she’s Jordan’s daughter and promises to be a devoted father figure to her to prove his love to her mother. It’s awkward to say the least.

I could go on with the missteps, but I do want to take a few minutes to praise the performances. Hall commits thoroughly, and hilariously, to her HBIC persona. (Jordan’s horribleness is a way over the top caricature, even for a film this broad, but Hall has fun leaning into the awful.) As she proves on her Showtimes series Insecure, Issa Rae is a born rom-com heroine—funky, funny, and relatable (April actually does have a tiny romantic subplot but it’s—shocker—underdeveloped.) But the movie belongs to Martin, who is almost uncannily good as a 36 year old trapped in a 13-year-old’s body. Every withering comeback, every knowing glare, and every uncomfortably come-hither look she gives her hot teacher is delivered to perfection. You truly believe this child is 36. It’s enough to make me guardedly recommend the film. But, nonetheless, Little is no Big.