Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another surged to the front of the awards-season pack on Wednesday as the National Board of Review named it best film of 2025 and handed the Warner Bros. release four additional prizes, including director for Anderson and acting honors for Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio Del Toro and newcomer Chase Infiniti. The haul arrives on the heels of best feature wins from both the Gotham Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle earlier in the week.
The NBR awards cemented the film’s hold on the season’s early narrative. DiCaprio won best actor for his turn as a former radical pulled back into conflict to protect his daughter, while Del Toro claimed supporting actor and Infiniti took the breakthrough performance prize. Anderson was cited for directing the sprawling action thriller, adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and already hailed by many critics as the director’s most personal work.
Voters spread the remaining top prizes across a wide slate. Rose Byrne took best actress for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, with Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas named best supporting actress for Sentimental Value. Ryan Coogler’s vampire saga Sinners won original screenplay and a cinematography award for Autumn Durald Arkapaw, while Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar’s Train Dreams prevailed in adapted screenplay. It Was Just an Accident was honored as international film, Arco as animated feature and Cover-Up as documentary.
The group’s top 10 films list underlined how crowded the race has become. Alongside One Battle After Another, NBR singled out franchise titles such as Avatar: Fire and Ash and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, awards-oriented dramas like Marty Supreme and Rental Family, and a fresh wave of studio-backed genre fare. Four Netflix releases — Frankenstein, Jay Kelly, Train Dreams and Wake Up Dead Man — made the list, signaling the streamer’s continued clout in theatrical-adjacent awards play.
The latest sweep deepens the sense that Anderson’s film has become this year’s default frontrunner. The Los Angeles–shot VistaVision epic, which pairs large-scale stunts with a knotty father–daughter story, has earned strong reviews and about $202 million worldwide on a budget reported between $130 million and $175 million, a career high on both counts for the director.
Awards handicappers, though, treat the NBR win as one data point rather than a coronation. The New York–based organization, founded in 1909 and made up of film enthusiasts, industry figures and academics, aligned with the eventual Oscar best picture winner 24 times in its first 76 years, yet has matched only three times this century, with No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire and Green Book. Last year’s best film choice, Wicked, missed out on the Academy’s top prize.
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Reaction to One Battle After Another also remains split in some corners of film culture. While many critics praise its mix of physical action and emotional intimacy, author Bret Easton Ellis has blasted the movie on his podcast as a “not-very-good” work buoyed by what he called a narrow “leftist sensibility,” arguing that its politics feel sealed off from the mood of the country. That tension between critical enthusiasm, industry awards and pockets of resistance will shadow the film as guilds weigh in and the Oscar race tightens.
