Paul Thomas Anderson’s title seems to echo the famous quote about history, but it could also easily be applied to raising a child. It is fitting, then, that the main action of One Battle After Another involves the hunt for a missing child, since a large part of parenting has to do with the risk of your child’s endangerment, and the consequent hope that you have given them the tools necessary for their well-being in the event that endangerment does arise.

Broaden the scope of a single child to an entire generation, and you have one of the film’s primary concerns—anxieties, even—over which many of its characters incite conflict, and/or try to secure on their own often blinkered, and ridiculous, terms. Anderson’s camera (operated by Michael Bauman, on 35mm and using VistaVision cameras) even seems to operate like a helicopter parent, tracking its subjects constantly through the American proto-dystopia, as diligent on its targets whether they are walking down hallways or on car chases through heavy traffic. And the child in question, Willa Ferguson née Charlene Calhoun (Chase Infiniti in her big screen debut), is by turns idealized and diminished by her elders until she is finally given the opportunity to dictate her fate in the film’s climax. […]