DiCaprio’s ‘One Battle After Another’ draws heat from some critics amid rising left-wing political violence

Leonardo DiCaprio’s newest film “One Battle After Another” is facing backlash from some critics, including “American Psycho” author Bret Easton Ellis, who argued that the film’s premiere was poorly timed given rising left-wing violence and its focus on a violent political revolution.

“It’s kind of shocking to see these kind of accolades for — I’m sorry, it’s not a very good movie — because of its political ideology, and it’s so obvious that’s what they’re responding to,” Eliis said on his podcast. “Why it’s considered a masterpiece, the greatest film of the decade, the greatest film ever made [is] because it really aligns with this kind of leftist sensibility.”

The “American Psycho” author asserted that the film would soon be viewed as “a kind of musty relic of the post-Kamala Harris era — that thing everyone gathers around and pretends is so fantastic and so great when it really isn’t, just to make a point… There’s a liberal mustiness to this movie that already feels very dated by October 2025. Very dated.”

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Ellis rejected one film critic’s opinion that “One Battle After Another” was an “important movie,” arguing that the filmmakers failed to take the country’s strenuous political climate into account.

“No, it is not. It has really not read the room,” he countered. “It has not read the room at all about what’s going on in America.”

The film, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Reagan-era set novel “Vineland,” follows The French 75, a Weather Underground-like group of self-described revolutionaries rebelling against what they believe is authoritarianism. The revolutionary group breaks illegal immigrants out of detention centers and bombs courthouses and offices of lawmakers who pushed abortion bans throughout the course of the film.

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Hollywood veteran Sean Penn also stars in the film from director Paul Thomas Anderson, playing Army Col. Steven Lockjaw — a man auditioning for a secretive, elite White supremacist group known as the Christmas Adventurers. The organization wields significant political influence and devotes its time to hunting down members of The French 75.

FoxNews.com columnist David Marcus slammed the movie as an “ill-timed apologia for left-wing violence,” comparing it to “watching a World War II film in which viewers are meant to cheer for lovable Nazis.”

“What is missing here is even the slightest bit of nuance about the glorious necessity to kill people, including innocents, in order to topple Anderson’s weird and paranoid version of the American government,” Marcus wrote in an opinion column last month.

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The conservative outlet National Review also criticized “One Battle After Another,” warning that “there will be bloodlust” inspired by the film.

“It’s a macabre coincidence that One Battle After Another opens so soon after the assassination of peaceable conservative debater Charlie Kirk,” the outlet wrote. “The film undeniably romanticizes political assassination … Anderson intentionally provokes the bloodlust of his woke confreres (and Gen Z viewers who know nothing about the Sixties) by celebrating the insipid, heretical, and violent activities of the liberal past and present. Anderson’s title lacks Pynchon’s pith but daydreams a culture of never-ending political obstruction and pandemonium. It is the year’s most irresponsible movie.”

Although some critics have voiced their concerns over the film’s themes of political violence and revolution, it has been a massive hit at the box office — bringing in over $100 million globally since its premiere in September and currently sits as the highest rated film of 2025 on Metacritic.

Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.