Star-Studded 2025 Crime Drama Movie Popular With Critics Is Coming to HBO Max This Week

HBO subscribers should get ready to crack open “a few small beers” and watch this year’s Academy Awards frontrunner.

Black comedy action drama One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, hits the streamer this Friday. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood), it is a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s classic 1990 postmodernist novel Vineland.

As of this moment, the film is the current Oscar frontrunner thanks to stunning performances by just about every member of the ensemble cast, which includes big names like DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor alongside a star-making turn from relatively unknown actress Chase Infiniti.

The film stars DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson, a washed-up ex-revolutionary whose political group (known as the French 75) is taken down by the police and his wife (Teyana Taylor) is captured. Stuck raising their daughter (Chase Infiniti) all alone, he mostly spends the next two decades getting drunk and watching old movies. But Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), the man responsible for taking down most of the French 75, seeks to finish the job so he can join an elite secret society of white supremacists.

One Battle After Another is the highest-grossing film of Anderson’s career, and the obvious Oscar frontrunner. At this year’s Golden Globes, which is usually an indicator of future Academy Awards success, it was the most-nominated film of the year with nine nominations. Current predictions say Infiniti is basically a lock to win an acting statue, while PTA is the heavy favorite for Best Director.

One Battle After Another hits HBO Max this Friday.