'American Psycho' Author Bret Easton Ellis Blasts Praise For Paul Thomas Anderson's 'One Battle After Another'
Bret Easton Ellis, the author of American Psycho, blasted the critical praise for Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, One Battle After Another, claiming it’s only being done due to the film’s political agenda.
The film has a glowing 95 on Metacritic and achieved the site’s “Must-See badge.”
Similarly on Rotten Tomatoes it has a 95% on the Tomatometer score. The Critics Consensus states, “An epic screwball adventure teeming with awe-inspiring action set pieces, One Battle After Another is Paul Thomas Anderson’s most entertaining film yet while also one of his most thematically rich.”
However, as reported by MovieMaker in one of his recent episodes The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, Ellis claims the praise is purely politically motivated. He said, “It’s kind of shocking to see these kind of accolades for — I’m sorry, it’s a not-very-good movie — because of it’s 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.”
While he shares that the film is currently being lauded due to this leftist sensibility, he believes it will be short lived and the film will be seen 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.”
Additionally, he believes the film completely misses the ball when analyzing the current political landscape of America, “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,” he explained. “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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I smell shenanigans with the RT audience rating.
The film was definitely not good. It had admirable technical qualities, because PTA is skilled at the craft, but it was lost and lacked a thematic center, flirting with questions about what political radicalism does to a person's moral compass, but being unwilling to actually engage with them lest it tarnish its polished Leftist stereotypes.