India, Sept. 26 -- American filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another arrives after nearly two decades of anticipation, a film that has been quietly gestating in the mind of one of Hollywood's most meticulous auteurs. It also finally unites Paul with Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor who came agonizingly close to starring in Boogie Nights (1997) decades ago, while Sean Penn joins as a chillingly grotesque antagonist. Adapted loosely from Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, the film translates a countercultural, politically charged novel into a sprawling, high-octane action drama with a deeply human core.

It begins with a violent eruption-an armed assault on a detention facility along the Mexican border led by the French 75, a radical ac...