One Battle After Another

The pitch sounds like a bit: the director of slow, aching character studies makes a shaggy action comedy about washed-up revolutionaries. The joke is that he is extremely good at it, and that he never once drops the character work to get there.

DiCaprio is playing a man permanently five minutes behind the plot, and it is the funniest he has been on screen. Not funny in a winking way. Funny in a sweaty, panicked, deeply unwell way that keeps tipping into something sad.

The action is shot with actual geography. You always know where everyone is, which sounds like the lowest possible bar until you remember how many films this year could not clear it. The chase in the final act is built almost entirely out of one simple idea and it is unbearable in the best way.

The middle stretch drags a fraction. There is a stretch of hiding and waiting that is doing thematic work, and you can feel it doing thematic work, which is the one moment the film shows its homework.

Everything else is a gift. Go in knowing as little as possible, sit as close to the middle as you can, and let it happen to you.