Who Was the Golden Globes-iest Golden Globes Nominee?

Cinema Romantico retired its longstanding Who is the Golden Globes-iest Golden Globes nominee bit last year because, honestly, we thought this whole oft-enjoyable but unquestionably farcical annual excuse for Hollywood to throw its holiday office party by honoring excellence in film and television was dead. I would have sworn I saw Taylor Swift kill it with my own eyes. But no, the Globes, it turns out, are a little like college football’s Bahamas Bowl, nominally international, perpetually on shaky ground, seemingly dead and buried but then resurrected as something called the Xbox Bowl. So, welcome to the 2026 Xbox Golden Globes. And boy, did I find their nominations this year fascinating. Not from a What This Means for Award Season perspective, mind you, but from their own This is a Soiree of Celebrity perspective.

It might seem surprising that “Wicked: For More Money” was not nominated in the Best Picture Comedy or Musical category, but they did nominate its two stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in the acting categories and so the producers can cut to them throughout the broadcast and still maintain the movie’s never-ending marketing campaign which is what really matters. Glen Powell did not make the cut in one of the two Best Actor movie categories for “The Running Man,” but that’s because the Globes voters knew they could slot him in for “Chad Powers” in the TV actor category, and then that movie acting slot could be set aside for “The Smashing Machine’s” Dwayne Johnson in order to put him at a prominent table so he can laugh too hard at all the bad jokes to convey he is willing to play the game and would really, really, really like to be nominated for one of the real awards. If there is any genuine shock, it’s that Sydney Sweeney did not earn a nomination for “Christy.” But then, look who got that nomination instead: Julia Roberts for “After the Hunt.” And you’re damn right, she did. 

Was she good in “After the Hunt?” I have no idea; I haven’t seen it yet; that’s not the point. The point is, the buzz on it has been bad, the reviews have been worse, no one has been discussing her as an awards contender, and yet, she finds herself with a nomination, nevertheless. Sydney Sweeney might be The Discourse Machine, but Julia Roberts is American royalty, our Princess of Wales, who is always invited to the party, irrefutably this year’s Golden Globes-iest. I’ll be happy to see her, whenever this thing airs, you can look up the date and time for the Xbox Golden Globes yourself. 

The Baltimorons

The Christmas season is defined by the contrast between light and dark and so, too, is “The Baltimorons,” the exceptional new indie comedy directed and co-written by Jay Duplass. It begins with Cliff (Michael Strassner) attempting to hang himself. Duplass, though, recounts this in long shot, an angle typically denoting comedy, and sure enough, Cliff winds up sprawled on the floor when the rope breaks, as startling as it is side-splitting, light and dark in equal measure. Indeed, later Cliff will explain the rope snapping was on account of his “holiday weight.” Flash ahead six months and Cliff is sober, engaged to Brittany (Olivia Luccardi), and has quit the improv comedy scene that exacerbated his tendency toward depression. He’s studying to be a mortgage broker, he says, always adding that he’s not joking, which can’t help but make you wonder if he is joking, hinting at dissatisfaction with his new life. As if manifesting that dissatisfaction, he bumps his face against the door of Brittany’s family house on his way in for Christmas Eve festivities, necessitating emergency dental surgery, performed by the only dentist available, workaholic Didi (Liz Larsen) who has been abandoned by her family for Christmas Eve festivities of her own, and triggering an unexpected comic adventure between the unlikely duo traversing Charm City on the holiest of nights.

“The Baltimorons” takes its title from the name of Cliff’s improv troupe before it went haywire, and rather than merely functioning as a character detail, Duplass’s entire movie is sculpted in the spirit of improvisational comedy. Cliff’s sudden tooth problem might as well be the audience shouting, “Dentist office!” when asked to provide a location. And though all the complications and incidents that follow, from Cliff’s car being towed, to the duo crashing Didi’s ex-husband’s wedding reception, to them going crabbing in the middle of night, might sound as if they strain credulity, “The Baltimorons” is not operating on traditional screenwriting terms. Even before Cliff and Didi wind up at an unlikely Christmas Eve improv pop-up and wind up onstage together, they are already caught up in the moment, egging one another on, spiritually saying, “Yes, and” to whatever this is. And whatever it is, thankfully, is not something that is ever truly decided or summarized, ultimately left up in the air, refusing to provide one big pat answer just as it refuses to minimize Cliff’s very real problems or reduce Brittany to a mere complication or impediment; she cares about him. 

Strassner also holds the light and dark in equal measure in his performance, as hilarious to watch as it is hard, suggesting something like a modern John Candy had he received the kind of roles he deserved. At an AA meeting near the end, when Cliff says the standard opening line about being an alcoholic, it resonates with fullness hard to believe until you hear it. As good as Strassner is, though, it’s Larsen who truly shines in bringing “The Baltimorons” home. There’s more than a little of “Harold and Maude” here and the way she calls him “kid” continually keeps cutting the whole relationship down to size. Her big husky laugh at the absurd things he tends to say and do conveys both disbelief at herself going along at this situation and implicit understanding of why she would. She evokes no sense of narrative programming, just someone stepping on the stage of alive and letting herself be carried along. “Where are we going with this, kid?” she asks as the movie ends, unsure but curious, utterly alive to the possibility.

Nearing the Bottom of the Sports Documentary Barrel

There are few movie genres at present more enervating and ubiquitous than sports documentaries. It is not just that they tend to be unenlightening Wikipedia-style histories and aesthetically uninteresting but that they are often made with the blessing if not involvement of their subjects to ensure maximum humdrum hagiography. When the six-part documentary chronicling one of the most unexciting big-name athletes of our age, Derek Jeter, was announced, I pitched some potential projects to spur us to the conclusion of the boring sports documentary boom sooner rather than later. Among my ho-hum ideas was a six-part documentary about NFL journeyman quarterback Dave Krieg. I proposed six parts because Krieg played for six teams during his career, none of which were the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And the only thing that might be more dull than a six-part Dave Krieg documentary would be a 10-part documentary on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a franchise that feels closer in a historical professional gridiron sense to the USFL’s Tampa Bay Bandits (whose former players the Buccaneers briefly employed during the strike season of 1987) than the NFL’s Cowboys, Packers, or Steelers. And yet, a 10-part documentary on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, “Raise the Flags,” presented by Skydance Sports and Prime Video Sports will begin streaming next Thursday, December 11th, on Amazon Prime.

A documentary about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers sounds like a documentary about the Minnesota Timberwolves, frankly, a pitch I have also made, and a franchise that much like the Bucs feels less known for anything of consequence than known for an all-around haplessness. True, Tampa Bay has won a pair of Super Bowls, but their first was a game the veteran NFL scribe Paul Zimmerman used one word - “Bleeaugh!” - to summarize and the Pandemic Super Bowl. No, if Tampa Bay has a claim to fame, it is losing the first 26 games they played as an expansion franchise christened in 1976, or maybe it is their old creamsicle jerseys, which deserve one whole episode in this thing, at least. “The rest of it,” Ray Ratto wrote of Buccaneer history at Defector, “is just a collection of 7-9 seasons with a playoff loss every three years or so on average. Decades of that.” I mean, that is essentially a sports documentary pitch that I would make!

Studio Head: “So, how exactly do you see this movie?”

Me: “As a collection of 7-9 seasons with a playoff loss every three years or so on average. Decades of that.”

Studio Head: “That doesn’t sound so exciting.”

Me: “Oh, God, no. But excitement isn’t what we’re looking for here.” 

Studio Head: “Well, will Tom Brady be involved?”

Me: “I don’t really see him as the archetypal Bucs quarterback.” 

Studio Head: “Who’s the archetypal Bucs quarterback?”

Me: “Steve DeBerg.”

Studio Head: “Steve DeBerg???”

Me: “Do you think we can get him to sit for an interview?”

Will “Raise the Flags” finally end the sports documentary as we know it? If I had one Christmas wish...

Pitches to Make Hollywood Great Again

Last week, Semafore reported that the President of the United States was urging one of his myriad billionaire bootlickers Larry Ellison to compel his Paramount CEO son David to revive “Rush Hour,” the Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker buddy cop franchise that seemingly died out in 2007 with “Rush Hour 3,” proving that even one of the best movie years of the new century was not above a cash grab cow pie. Less than 48 hours later, reports surfaced that, indeed, Paramount was planning to put “Rush Hour 4” into the production pipeline. It was a terrifying development. After all, the 47th President is not satisfied by merely being chief executive of the American government nor using the office of the Presidency to enrich himself and his family and various toadies, no, he wants to remake American culture in his image and in his style. It’s why the President razed the East Wing of the White House to build a bigly ballroom that will deliberately function as a blighted thumbprint in the Polaroid of Washington D.C. for eternity, assumed command of the Kennedy Center to transform our national cultural center into an extension of his uncultured ego, and now wants to infect Hollywood with various cinematic versions of the spray-painted gold accents he has affixed to the Oval Office. And though you might like to think other movie studio magnates would tell the President where to go if he came around making suggestions, the pathetic capitulation by so many non-movie industry moguls reminds us that most fat cats are, in fact, craven fraidy cats, and so soon, I imagine, His Imbecility will have access to Hollywood’s entire back catalogue, leaving one to wonder what other grotesque filmmaking ideas are wiggling around in the pudding where his brain should be. 

Pitches to Make Hollywood Great Again

Police Academy: Mission to Moscow. They have been blathering about the resuscitation of this franchise for years now but if the Big Fella gets involved, that talk, no doubt, will finally turn to some semblance of forcible action. And if it does, I expect we will see a remake of the last “Police Academy” movie remade as not-exactly-accidental pro-Russian propaganda co-starring Bill Burr who keeps saying of the parts of Russia he is allowed to see, “What a country!”

National Lampoon’s Scottish Vacation. The Griswold Family goes to T*ump Turnberry. 

Executive Decision 2. With Russia threatening to invade Finland, the President calls a surprise Rose Patio press conference at the White House to announce a sequel to “Executive Decision.” “You know they killed off the late, great Steven Seagal,” he says with the real, live Steven Seagal standing right next to him. “All my life people have been coming up to me and saying, ‘Sir, the movies haven’t been any good since they killed him off.’ But we’ll be bringing him back, we’ll be bringing him back.”  

King Ralph 2. Can’t you just picture His Imbecility forcing Charles and Camilla to watch this after some state dinner?

Cannonball III. “Sheer arrogance made this picture,” wrote Roger Ebert of the lamented “Cannonball II.” Who does that sound like? 

Tango & Cash, Best of the Best. I imagine that when the President says he wishes they made movies like they used to make them, a la Matt Dillon in “There’s Something About Mary,” these are the two movie titles he cites. 

Sister Act III. Helping a President get to heaven. “But we’ll have to get there without Whoopi. Whoopi was very, very mean to me.” 

Other People’s Money 2. Self-explanatory.

Cocktail/Bartender 2. There’s that infamous bit in Bret Easton Ellis’s book American Psycho where the titular character encounters Tom Cruise on an elevator and obliviously refers to the actor’s 1988 movie “Cocktail” as Bartender, not even seeming to register Cruise correcting him. And so, I imagine T*ump doing the same thing, essentially, and commissioning a sequel of “Cocktail” that will have to be released as “Bartender” because he thinks that’s what it’s called and keeps calling it that, no matter how many times he is corrected. If nothing else, this means we will finally get to see whether Tom Cruise, when called upon, will join the resistance.  

The Alamo. The historic San Antonio fortress of the Texas Revolution is reimagined as Washington D.C.’s Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab where a band of tourists from Real America must defend themselves against pet-eating immigrants marauding through the nation’s capital. 

Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! In an overnight social media post, the President seems to call for a live action movie of the 1987 Nintendo game when he confuses it for “Rocky IV” while also confusing Soda Popinski for Ivan Drago.  

Top 10 Made-for-TV Christmas Movies Synopses for 2025

It has been five years since the last Alicia Witt Hallmark Channel Christmas movie, “Christmas Tree Lane.” I know, I remember it, both well and not at all because My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I watched it on Election Night 2020 in a futile effort at distraction. Witt has always been my favorite Made-for-TV Christmas movie lead because she tends to elevate their formulaic nature by infusing a sense of complication, soul, and wit, no pun intended. Heck, she’ll often wear gloves and a hat even if she’s filming in the middle of summer, a commitment to veracity not often replicated by her peers. Since 2020, though, she has suffered some serious personal strife, and so it’s wholly understandable if she wanted to step away, and she has since seemed to focus more on her music career, and hey, I respect a multi-hyphenate too. But while you occasionally still get a surprising lead performance in these movies, like Emily Arlook in last year’s “Leah’s Perfect Gift,” or Reshma Shetty in 2022’s “Jolly Good Christmas,” the Made-for-TV holiday movie season has not been the same without her. I don’t want to say my Christmas wish is for her return, because that still feels presumptuous given what she endured. No, I just want her to know that the Hallmark Hive loves her and misses her and hopes she is doing well and if she ever wants to return, we will break out the celebratory peppermint bark in her honor.

Now, as always, here are this season’s best synopses. (All movies from the Hallmark Channel except where otherwise noted.)  

Top 10 Made-for-TV Christmas Movies Synopses for 2025

10. Champagne Problems. (Netflix) “A driven American exec heads to Paris determined to acquire a champagne brand by Christmas and accidentally falls for the heir to the bubbly empire.” Boy, I just hope this driven American exec embraces the Parisian lifestyle more than Emily Cooper.

9. A Royal Montana Christmas. “When a princess abandons her royal duties to unwind at a Montana ranch ahead of Christmas, she meets a charming guide who offers her a glimpse of rustic life—and it’s entirely different from her regal one.” The royal-themed ones are trendy these days and it’s why if I were the publicist for Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, I’d council the best way to improve her PR would be to go through the looking glass and star in one of these as herself.

8. Rodeo Christmas Romance. (Lifetime) “When fiercely independent equestrian Emma finds herself ranch-sitting for a friend while caring for her injured horse over Christmas, she clashes with a brooding veteran.” I always appreciate a nice twist on the traditional hard-charging event planner, or career-oriented CEO, and a fiercely independent equestrian is a good one.

7. Christmas at Mistletoe Manor. (GAC) “When Alice, a spirited East Coast cooking show influencer, journeys to a centuries-old English castle to honor a WWII nurse by laying her remains in the castle gardens, she finds herself swept into the castle’s holiday magic — and the unexpected warmth of its charming proprietor.” But maybe not as good as “spirited East Coast cooking show influencer.” What even is a cooking show influencer? Someone who hosts a cooking show but does not cook and instead just hawks brand name ingredients for meals that you, yourself, can figure out how to cook on your own time? And why East Coast? Is this a dig at New California Cuisine? 

6. Merry Christmas, Ted Cooper. “A Christmas-loving weatherman has had a tough year; upon returning to his hometown, he bumps into a former teacher who always cheered him on, and his former crush — and things start to look up.” Solid em dash action there. 

5. A Wisconsin Christmas Pie. (GAC) “A pastry chef returns to Door County, WI for the holidays, and must choose between her dream job and the legacy of her family’s cherry orchard business - with a little help from her high school sweetheart, and a lost cherry pie recipe.” A little digging reveals our pastry chef heroine is returning to Wisconsin from Chicago, and so, I mean, sure, 300 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline is nice and all, but who wants that, really, when you can get scenic views of the Chicago River from your CTA train car which has been stuck on the Wells Bridge for 45 minutes due to switching problems? 

4. Oy to the World! “When a broken water line forces a church and temple to share space for overlapping Hanukkah and Christmas Eve, rival choir directors Nikki and Jake must collaborate on a joint music program, discovering harmony, unity, and unexpected romance along the way.” According to sources, the FCC will be counting each utterance of Christmas and Hanukkah and if there are more Hanukkahs than Christmases, then Hallmark Countdown to Christmas will be cancelled. 

3. She’s Making a List. “The top inspector of a consulting firm, which Santa hires to help him build the Naughty and Nice List, unexpectedly falls for the widowed father of a misbehaved 11-year-old she’s assessing.” A consultant? What’s next, Santa hires an efficiency expert?

2. The More the Merrier. “Sparks fly between an emergency room doctor and a cardiologist as they work together to deliver three babies just in time for Christmas.” Our first Sparks Fly of the list! A synopsis that truly jibes with the titular pun is what makes the season bright. 

1. Melt My Heart This Christmas. “A spirited glassblower lands a last-chance gig assisting her artistic idol at a famed Christmas market, but as sparks fly with the uptight event manager standing between her and her dreams, she discovers that sometimes love is the most unexpected masterpiece of all.” The real masterpiece is this synopsis.

Ray of Light

The truth is, as I sit down to type this post, I have no idea what I even want to say about this photo of Sofia Coppola and Josh Hartnett except that when I saw it a couple weeks ago, it filled me with warm fuzzies. It was snapped at the Museum of Modern Art’s annual film benefit which this year honored Coppola. She spoke at the event and in doing so, took the piss out of herself for being both a nepo baby and the person who “single-handedly ruined the Godfather films.” If it was a solid bit of self-deprecating humor, it also made me reflect how she never would have done the latter had she not been the former, which is to say only a nepo baby could have been pilloried by the public on account of her father’s decision to put his daughter in a position for which she was manifestly unequipped. And even though her father undoubtedly gave her leg up on getting started in the late 90s as a filmmaker, upon succeeding right out of the gate, she was subject to industry gossip that her famous father must have somehow been involved in her creative success. It cuts both ways, is what I’m saying, and I’ve often thought about why we – both the royal we and me, myself – tend to refer to Sofia Coppola by her given name rather than her surname. I don’t think it’s meant to be infantilizing or possessive but distinguishing; we refer to Sofia Coppola as Sofia because she transcended the family name a long, long time ago.

Josh Hartnett’s route to Hollywood was a little different. A native of St. Paul, Minnesota he crisscrossed the country, briefly studying to be an actor in New York before lighting out for L.A. and eventually landing Coppola’s debut “The Virgin Suicides” as he would sweetly recount on the MoMA red carpet not on the strength of his name, since nobody really knew who he was, but by audition tape. I don’t want to overstate the case here and say that Hartnett was ever anything like my favorite actor, but his searching earnestness opposite Eric Bana’s zero f*cks air in “Black Hawk Down” always stuck with me, as did his work in “The Virgin Suicides” where he is sort of evincing a Me Decade Jordan Catalano, or something, and I always respected that he was on his own journey, turning down superhero roles. And it’s why for a while there in the twenty-tens I thought we might have lost him, in a manner of speaking, to wandering the wilderness in indifferent VOD dreck for the rest of his career. I hesitate to call what he’s experiencing a comeback, maybe more like a rejuvenation, appearing in a Best Picture, cutting loose in a couple Guy Ritchie joints, fronting some middling thrillers with an ebullient gleam in his eye, and starring opposite Anne Hathaway in next year’s “Verity.”  

They are two Gen-Xers, which as a Gen-Xer myself counts for something here, and they’ve both been through it, in ways alike and not alike at all, and yet, in an industry that has no qualms about chewing you up or spitting you out, whether you’re of the Coppolas or the Hartnetts, there they both were, still standing.

One Battle After Another

“One Battle After Another” has frequently been described as writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s first action movie, and that proves true in more ways than one. It is an action movie in the genre sense, packed with car chases and cartoon-like stunts, even a Tom Cruise name-drop, while being propelled with such a dynamic camera and kinetic pace that its two-hours-and-fifty-minutes seem to last an hour, tops, a movie as one virtual headlong rush. But this breakneck tempo also innately feeds into “One Battle After Another’s” larger idea as a movie about the desperation, folly, necessity, recklessness, hopelessness, and hope of taking action. “If it does not seem that those words should be strung together,” Roger Ebert once wrote of another instant classic, “perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life.”

The opening sequence does not so much draw back a curtain on characters and events as remove a blindfold from our eyes after a long car ride to parts unknown and plunging us directly into an operation of the far-left revolutionary group known as the French 75. That was Rick Blaine’s drink in “Casablanca” as he often found himself in a grey are while weighing whether to remain neutral or get involved and a grey area is where “One Battle After Another” often finds itself too. Like the no holds barred beginning in which Anderson effectively, if not dangerously, animates not only the anarchic but kinky thrill of such fanaticism as the French 75 liberates a detention camp and sets off bombs built by the so-called Rocketman, Pat Calhoun (Leonard DiCaprio), who is in love with fellow extremist Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). There’s a recurring joke about Pat’s failure to study the rebellion text, and though that might sound like Anderson isn’t taking their mission seriously, it’s more an evocation so many similar far-left groups and their sensationalist, sincere, sometimes incomprehensible motivations. We never hear the French 75 read their manifesto because this opening is the manifesto.

This revolutionary idyll is compromised, however, when Perfidia kills a security guard during a bank robbery and learns she’s pregnant. Pat wants to put their baby first, but Anderson suggests that the amount of skin in the game is different based on skin color. Perfidia is shown to hail from a line of Black revolutionaries, and to her, the cause supersedes any one person, even her own child. The thorniness of this decision underlines the multi-layered nature of Anderson’s screenplay, as intricate in its ideas as it is obvious. Look no further than Perfidia’s name, Latin for betrayal, foreshadowing how after committing murder, she names names and enters witness protection, never to be seen again, the deliberate sidelining of Taylor’s explosive presence mirroring the French 75’s implosion as Pat goes underground with their daughter, Charlene. That child, however, is not his. 

Enter: Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), overseeing the detention camp the French 75 liberates as the movie opens, who becomes tormented by and obsessed with Perfidia after she paradoxically deadens his sense of power by asking him in no uncertain terms to get it up and parading him around in just that manner. He gets the last word by extorting her for sex, and then forcing her to become a proverbial rat, only for her to vindictively ghost him while leaving Charlene behind. The child becomes paramount when Lockjaw is invited to join a white-only secret society whose name, The Christmas Adventurers Club, sardonically equates the War on Christmas with Gen. Jack D. Ripper’s battle to maintain purity of essence in “Dr. Strangelove.” (Their salutation of “Hail Saint Nick” sounds like the password at M*gyn K*lly’s Christmas party.) They explain to Lockjaw their belief of being the supreme race and therefore supreme beings and as they do, Penn does the most incredible thing with his face, as if the Colonel’s life flashes before his eyes, craving an honor he knows he does not deserve given the ostensible impurity of his precious bodily fluids. To ensure his qualifications for the club, he enlists a division of the armed forces for a search and destroy mission of his biracial heir. 

Time is nebulous in “One Battle After Another.” Based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, about a 70s revolutionary withering in the 80s, Anderson sets his movie in something approximating the present but never comes out and says it; I only realized it was a modern setting upon noticing someone taking a selfie. This can make the French 75 feel out of place, 70s counterculture oddly transplanted to the 21st century, but in this muddling of eras, Anderson inherently suggests both the perpetual futility in fighting the machine and the eternal need for it. That duality comes across in Pat, rechristened Bob Ferguson after he goes underground in the small California town of Baktan Cross with Charlene, rechristened Willa (Chase Infiniti). At one point, he is shown smoking dope and watching “The Battle of Algiers” on the couch, which is as uproariously pitiful as it is on the nose. Costumed to look less like Leo than Kevin Corrigan, DiCaprio fully inhabits the incongruous blend of both the perpetually baked protagonist of “The Big Lebowski” (Jeff Bridges) and that same movie’s reactionary Malibu police chief (Leon Russom), a spent counterculturist confronting modern political correctness, but never forgetting to let an almost fervent protective love for Willa seep through, a deft feat of zaniness and earnestness.

Under the guise of a drug and immigrant operation, Lockjaw and his men invade Baktan Cross, and when Bob and Willa become separated, the listless father is finally forced up and off the couch (though not necessarily out of his bathrobe) to re-enlist, in manner of speaking. He is aided in his rescue mission by his daughter’s sensei, Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), who in effect becomes Bob’s sensei, too. Even in a movie chock full of exemplary turns, del Toro’s is especially exquisite, echoing the movie’s wavelength by infusing philosophical lines with as much genuine humor as real weight (“Courage, Bob”), though he doesn’t even require dialogue to make an impression, embodying the whole person in his air, a cool, encouraging, patient countenance that is not just an impeccable juxtaposition to Bob’s manic air but an expression of someone leading by example. In these sequences, “One Battle After Another” essentially leads by example too. Baktan Cross, it turns out, is not merely a sanctuary for ex-radicals but also for Mexican immigrants, which Anderson intrinsically lays out side-by-side with Sergio fostering Bob’s escape, a community as an act of resistance itself, and one that might just be more effective than the French 75’s more lethal tactics. 

As Willa, Infiniti evinces both the singular impulsive honesty of a teenager but also a preciousness identifying her as a chip off her mother’s block. Indeed, Bob might be coming to her rescue, but ultimately, she rescues herself, putting into perspective how Anderson yokes Willa’s dawning political awareness to the age-old idea of a parent having to make peace with letting their child go. And if she has both Perfidia and Bob in her, she also carries the tutelage of Sergio, and the biology of her natural father, too, a complicated personification of an impossibly complicated country, one that is always so close to its potential and yet always so far away from it. And that’s why against all odds, “One Battle After Another” earns its concluding needle drop, a father passing the torch to his daughter, sending Willa out the door and on her way, gearing up for the next battle in the endless struggle.