2026 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee - One Battle After Another

• IMDB link: One Battle After Another
• Tagline: "When their evil enemy resurfaces after 16 years, a group of ex-revolutionaries reunite to rescue the daughter of one of their own."  
• My Best Picture Project

    At its heart, this movie is a really excellent action/chase movie with a lot of tension, great acting, and engaging characters, and I liked it wildly more than the last Leonardo DiCaprio movie I saw (Killers of the Flower Moon).  It's full of dark humor and is a wonderful thrill ride.

    But.

    It is not without flaws. The immigration theme is a thin veneer that forms a backdrop to the movie, but it's not well integrated into the story. You can swap out ICE agents for Zombies, tweak a few details, and it would work just as well.  Or you could use the story as the basis for another Ocean's Eleven movie (one in which things go really, really wrong).  Immigration is a theme, but it's not what it's about.  

    Because the ICE/Revolutionary conflict is just a backdrop, that theme ends up feeling kind of performative and shallow. And what is the message? If I had to guess, it's "Pro-ICErs are ruthless, evil, and violent, and Anti-ICErs are stupid, paranoid, and violent."  

    And boy, are they stupid at times. The protagonists take unbelievably stupid risks for no gain, usually for laughs (stopping for sex when they should be escaping, or monologuing while walking on countertops), but these things didn't feel like something revolutionaries would actually do.  I would imagine they are more businesslike.   Even worse, they rat out their friends just unbelievably easily, yet we are supposed to believe that a completely paranoid organization wouldn't practice information hygiene to protect against that?  Every person who is caught knows WAY more about their friends than they should, and they endanger each other repeatedly.

    

    One of my favorite characters was Col. Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn.  He did a fabulous job creating a character that was Inspector Javert (but without the heart) mixed with Norman Bates or perhaps Travis Bickle. He walks weirdly, is a racist who fetishizes black women, and he's just ... off.   He was too weird even for the movie's Klan group (in a delightfully sly, ironic moment, Lockjaw is awarded the Bedford Forrest prize for excellence). Another neat parallel: the movie's two main villains are both played by Jewish men, echoing the casting and the actors' intent in Casablanca.

    I want to call out three actors who played small but important roles.  The first was Kevin Tighe who played paramedic Roy DeSoto in Emergency!  In this, he played a delightfully cantankerous elderly grand-dragon-type character. The other was Eric Schweig, who played Uncas in Last of the Mohicans.  In One Battle, he played a far less noble character, a Native American bounty hunter who works for the very people who hold him in contempt.   The last one is James Raterman who plays the ICE interrogator throughout the movie. He isn't (usually) a professional actor. He is a security consultant and former Homeland Security Investigator. He did a great job portraying an entirely competent agent. His character wasn't the slightest bit clownish, and ended up being one of the most frightening because of it.

    Finally, a note about politics.  The movie-makers were careful not to tie the movie to any specific POTUS in either of its two time periods, fifteen years apart. It could take place during any presidency starting with George W. Bush (ICE was formed in 2003), but it ended up feeling a little mistimed, given the real-life ICE conflicts happening right now.  For 15 of the last 22 years, I've lived an hour outside the Twin Cities. I'm still in Minnesota, but a little farther away now, and the situation in Minneapolis is incredibly tense, no matter which side of the conflict you are on, and for me, seeing a movie that uses that tension for frivolous entertainment value is a bit like poking a bruise.  The movie was made and released before Operation Metro Surge, but it hit awfully close to home.

    So, yeah, I really liked the movie—it was funny, tense, fast-paced, well-acted, and utterly engaging—and I definitely recommend it.  But you should go into it understanding that it reflects current events more than you might like.

(Pithy Reviews; and Rankings* out of 10 nominees):

1. Sinners (Southern gothic vampires sing the Blues; Cathy: 1, Chris: 1)
2. Bugonia (Alien-hunting conspiracy theorists; Cathy: 5, Chris: 2)
3. Train Dreams (Dreamy old logger survives ... life; Cathy: 2, Chris: 3)
4. One Battle After Another (Daddy-Daughter Revolution; Cathy: 4, Chris: 4)
5. F1: The Movie (Mesmerizing Top Gun for Formula 1 Fans; Cathy: 3, Chris 5)
6. Frankenstein (Monster-'splaning; Cathy: 6, Chris: 6)

• Hamnet (Cathy: x, Chris: x)
• Marty Supreme (Cathy: x, Chris: x)
• The Secret Agent (Cathy: x, Chris: x)
• Sentimental Value (Cathy: x, Chris: x)

* Rankings can change.