Latest film reviews: Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn go Oscar hunting in weird outfits

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (15, 162 mins) *****

Lucky Leo has done it again – and delivered yet another remarkably ambitious film.

In one of the best action thrillers since Mad Max: Fury Road (2014), DiCaprio is an on-the-slide revolutionary called Bob.

After crossing paths with old adversary, Col Steven J Lockjaw (Sean Penn) he will have to risk his own life to find something precious.

Benicio Del Toro co-stars in funny trousers as community leader Sensei Sergio St Carlos but for every leading man there’s a strong woman too thanks to tough characters like Deandra (Regina Hall), Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) and Willa (newcomer Chase Infiniti).

Beautifully shot by cinematographer Michael Bauman (Licorice Pizza), the film is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland (1990) and its exploration of President Nixon’s ‘war on drugs’.

With this film's emphasis on illegal migration, violence, racial politics and sexual favours, the discombobulating, extended first chapter feels uncomfortably relevant to the biggest crisis in the modern world and how the US in particular might go forwards or backwards.

But stick with it – the rest of the film begins to fill in the back story even if the chaotic, episodic structure means most of the characters end up short-changing us in terms of whether we really care about any of their fates.

From Titanic to Gangs Of New York, Catch Me If You Can, The Departed, Blood Diamond, Inception, The Revenant and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, DiCaprio has always relished adventure.

And working with the best directors, too, from James Cameron to Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino. Not for him the tedium of working with tennis balls and blue screens on the next Marvel hit.

Here, for the first time, he’s under the spell of Magnolia writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, whose There Will Be Blood (2008) helped grandson-of-Birmingham Daniel Day-Lewis to his second of three record-breaking best actor Oscar awards.

Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood composed the screechy score for that movie and is back again here for his sixth collaboration with Anderson. Once again, elements of his latest work (like the skyscraper-high piano notes) might threaten to drive you mad, but the mind-boggling complexity of his multidextrous themes are all part of the film’s chemistry.

The scenes driven by percussion are some of the best drums-to-celluloid combos this side of Whiplash (2014) – which certainly whets the appetite for DiCaprio starring for its director, Damien Chazelle, in a future movie called Evil Knievel On Tour.

There are several car chase sequences too, including one which feels like a mesmerising, undulatory homage to both Tarantino (Death Proof, 2007) and the kind of illusory thrills Hitchcock might have created today.

Best of all, it’s not just Anderson’s script that’s trying to have fun. So too are the clothes, the make-up, the hairstyles, sunglasses and, with one character, the walk – possibly the most distinctive shuffle since Terminator 2 (1991).

In other words, this is a movie offering food for thought and comedy amid one thrill after another – especially if you can see it at least once on an IMAX screen.

A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY (15, 109 mins) **

Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie headlining a new romantic drama might sound like a good idea. But would the pairing of any two stars appeal if you knew they were playing second fiddle to the voice of a sat-nav?

Sarah (Margot Robbie) and David (Colin Farrell) meet at a mutual friends’ wedding. Thanks to an ageing hire car being equipped with a talking sat-nav voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith, their own individual journeys to the present are relived via various portals into angst, melancholia and more. How will context impact their futures?

After a foul-mouthed Female Cashier with a German accent (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and The Mechanic (Kevin Kline) welcome David to The Car Rental Agency – a setting which belongs in a Wes Anderson movie – many viewers will soon wish the entire film had been turbo-charged.

If only it had extra air in its tyres and would would slip through the gears with the efficiency of the peerless railway drama Brief Encounter (1945) – which certainly wouldn’t have gone for cringeworthy Burger King product placement even if such a thing had existed at the time.

Directed by Kogonada (and no, he’s not a ‘Hitchcock’, ‘Scorsese’ or ‘Spielberg’ that you’ve never heard of), the stylish production has some interesting music. Shame he keeps applying the handbrake!

Like so many high concept films, from Bicentennial Man (1999) to The Time Traveller’s Wife (2009) it’s all terribly laboured – even the nod to La La Land is superfluous.

That it’s also frequently raining further dampens the spirits (and filming that way must surely be the nearest thing to self-torture).

Farrell’s best roles – In Bruges (2008) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) – have been opposite Brendan Gleeson, a man’s man actor if ever there was one. Have another look at the brisk Phone Booth (2002) if you want Farrell with (old school) technology.

Here, the inescapable real-life fact that Barbie-star Robbie is 14 years younger than the now 49-year-old Farrell doesn’t help their chemistry to ever sizzle.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey perfectly explains why I’m a sat-nav refusenik. Why rely on a fallible machine when you might end up enjoying a wilder trip under your own steam as a result of making your own mistakes?

DOWNTOWN ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE (PG, 123 mins) ***

Creator Julian Fellowes brings the curtain down on all-star Downton life with the 1930s’ fate of the Crawley family having some echoes with the real-life tax dilemmas facing various communities today.

The opening ‘outside to inside’ tracking shot set in London’s West End is a thing of wonder, the golden finale likely to moisten the eyes of super fans who will feel like they’ve drunk a pint of cream without feeling the least bit sick on the way home.

THE LONG WALK (15, 108 mins) ****

Written in 1967 and published more than a decade later under a pseudonym, Stephen King’s violent thriller feels remarkably relevant today.

Though not a war movie, it is gripping and gruelling in equal measure and sums up the often unfair way men can be randomly killed in battle one by one.

On a seemingly endless walk where the only finishing line is the one where there’s just one man left standing, how does each loss impact the dwindling band of survivors?

SPINAL TAP II: THE END CONTINUES (15, 87 mins) ***

Now in their 70s, our spoof documentary heroes from 1984 are reunited and ready to rock one last time – if only they can find a new drummer to replace all the ones who have previously tried and died.

Enter Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Elton John with some admirably straight-faced supporting roles as well as the returning filmmaker Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner).

The recipe is nothing like as groundbreaking second time around, but fuzzily nostalgic and sporadically fun all the same.

+ Graham Young is a former UK Regional Film Journalist of the Year and three-time runner-up.

PICTURE CREDITS

One Battle After Another / Warner Bros

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey / Sony Pictures Releasing

The Long Walk / Lionsgate

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues / Sony Pictures Releasing

Downton Abbey – The Grand Finale / Universal