When I went into Paul Thomas Anderson’s highly anticipated political epic One Battle After Another this past weekend, I figured it would be somewhat along the lines of his past film, the absurdist and irreverent Inherent Vice (2014). The former is based on a 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon and the latter is roughly inspired by another novel by the author, Vineland (1990).

But what I got felt more like a modernized interpretation of Victor Hugo’s 1831 classic novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to the point where I’m a little surprised more people aren’t also seeing the parallels.

In the late 2000s, a revolutionary known as Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) leads a radical, extremist group called The French 75. In between secretly releasing immigrants from detention centers and planting

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