Review: One Battle After Another Sees America Clearly

Spoilers for One Battle After Another below .

State-sanctioned violence is everywhere in Paul Thomas Anderson’s most recent film, One Battle After Another , beginning from its explosive opening sequence. A group of guerrillas meets near the U.S.-Mexico border with a mission to storm the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego — a real immigration-detention facility that is one of the largest in the country and has a history of alleged human-rights abuses — and liberate the migrants being held there. The border wall, so prized by the right wing, looms large. Images of children incarcerated inside a chain-link pen are unsettling to watch because they so closely mirror both the horrors of family separation and the mass-deportation agenda that the Trump administration is violent