‘American Psycho’ Scribe Bret Easton Ellis Calls Out Liberal Bias In Praise For Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘One Battle After Another’
The Antifa-friendly dramedy One Battle After Another is a bomb in the theatrical sense, but is still winning praise from the sort of critics who eat that sort of stuff up. When it has elements that attract them, it’s easy to understand why.
The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, the main characters are terrorists and racists, and there are a few ‘powerful, stunning, and brave’ women of color. Add to that it’s a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, and you have the shake-and-bake recipe for Oscar bait. It shouldn’t take a us or a celebrated writer like Bret Easton Ellis to point that out, but he didn’t hold back.
On his eponymous podcast, he opined, “It’s kind of shocking to see these kinds of accolades for – I’m sorry, it’s a not-very-good movie – because of its political ideology. And it’s so obvious that is what they’re responding to, why it’s considered a masterpiece, the greatest film of the decade, the greatest film ever made. Because it really aligns with this kind of leftist sensibility.”
Ellis added (via Movie Maker) that One Battle will probably be looked upon as “a kind of musty relic of the post-Kamala Harris era – that thing that everyone gathers around and pretends is so fantastic and so great when it really isn’t, just to make a point. And that’s unfortunate, but that’s where we are now.”
“It has really not read the room. It has not read the room at all about what’s going on in America. There’s a liberal mustiness to this movie that already feels very dated by October 2025. Very dated,” Ellis expanded. “And it just doesn’t read the room. You know, it reads a tiny corner of the room, but it does not read what is going on in America.”
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This is no coincidence; the fatal flaw of One Battle After Another and similar films, such as Mickey 17, is that they were anticipating a particular outcome when they were in production, i.e., before the 2024 election. Chances are good Hollywood didn’t predict Donald Trump becoming President again or that alternative media would do a victory lap.
A cultural shift away from DEI and wokeness has been declared. Still, Rotten Tomatoes is propping up both films as acclaimed masterpieces despite their box office failures. One Battle After Another has a Certified Fresh Critic Score of 95 percent based on 391 reviews.
Miraculously, it also boasts a “Verified Hot” ranking of 85 percent, even though when you scroll through the all-audience reviews, they tend to be middling one-and-a-half or two stars. You’ll find the same thing when you look at Mickey17 on the Tomatometer; verified scores replace the general audience ratings to prop up a flop.
