“One Battle After Another” has screened for press and industry, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s raved-about action thriller (which is also a comedy!) is now an Oscar frontrunner, as IndieWire’s Anne Thompson already said. (IndieWire’s David Ehrlich also called it possibly the best American studio movie since he became a film critic. That’s setting down some big shoes to fill.)
Nevertheless, on this week’s episode of IndieWire’s “Screen Talk” podcast, co-hosts Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio catch up on the movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a former revolutionary searching for his missing daughter (Chase Infiniti) after a fabled former enemy (Sean Penn) returns. Benicio Del Toro, Teyana Taylor, and Regina Hall also star in an epic that may run 2 hours, 40 minutes, and change, but it feels like 90 minutes. Ryan thinks “One Battle After Another” will go all the way to win multiple top Oscars and probably Best Picture, while Anne makes the case for Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” and Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” to do the same.
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Speaking of, Ryan finally caught up on “Hamnet” after missing out on Telluride and Toronto. Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal give moving performances as a grieving William Shakespeare and his wife after their son dies of the plague, but Ryan had a bone to pick about the use of Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” in a key emotional climax, a piece we’ve already heard in “Arrival,” “The Last of Us,” and “Shutter Island” in similarly cathartic moments. Plus, Richter had a whole original score (one likely to be Oscar-nominated) written and ready, right there!
We also recap what went down at last weekend’s Venice Film Festival awards, where Alexander Payne’s jury controversially chose Jim Jarmusch’s “Father Mother Sister Brother” as the Golden Lion winner over projected winner “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s pro-Palestine Gaza rescue drama.
Listen to this week’s episode below.
