One Battle After Another S4E1 Movie Review

Season four kicks off with Cade and Kit officially shifting into their “Best of 2025” format: five categories, ranked by box office, Rotten Tomatoes, and audience scores, now using the five-star scale to see where their taste lands against the wider review world. They open with a “let’s start strong” pick — One Battle After Another — partly because it’s already getting major awards attention, but they’re immediately skeptical of the critic/audience split and the type of criticism that focuses on craft references over whether a movie actually works.They summarize the film as a long, messy chain of events: an anti-resistance/elite-club conspiracy setup, a missing mom, a burned-out dad hiding out, and a 16-year-old daughter who eventually gets pulled into the endgame. They clock a few bright spots — a couple clever visual jokes (the “taco” shirt), Del Toro’s sensei character feeling grounded, and DiCaprio convincingly playing “sloppy disaster” — but most of their reaction is frustration: the tone is confused, the stakes don’t build, the movie drags (2h 41m), and they keep noticing how often they’re feeling the runtime.Their biggest complaints are that it doesn’t satisfy any audience lane: not enough action for action viewers, not layered enough for arthouse/story people, not funny enough for comedy lovers, and even as critics they feel it’s “pretty but empty.” They call out a repetitive single-note piano cue that becomes distracting, the script feeling trope-stacked, and a finale that wraps with a cliché “letter” setup that feels like it’s begging for a sequel rather than earning an ending. By the end, they land on the simplest verdict possible: one star — not because it has zero craft, but because they wouldn’t recommend it to anyone and they can’t figure out who the movie is actually for.🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2kaH2BpUcEouX5LWCUQ7ed?si=ff1e2b355c5944e1🍏 Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cade-and-kit/id1771553610📸 Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://instagram.com/[email protected]