One Battle After Another Would Make A Perfect Double Feature With A 2025 Box Office Bomb

Hold on there, just a minute. This article contains spoilers for "Eddington" and "One Battle After Another."

In the most optimistic future I can imagine, we look back on the films of 2025 with a sort of thankful nostalgia — gratitude that the political pandemonium and cultural chaos portrayed didn't last, and instead became window dressing for a very specific era of cinema. It's a stretch, I know. For now, all we have are two particular movies that show the contradictions, grotesqueries, violence, and paranoia of the present moment. I'm talking, of course, about Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another" and Ari Aster's "Eddington."

Released just months apart and filmed against similar backdrops of the American southwest, these two films differ pretty starkly when you just lo