An anti-fascist movie arrives at a fascist moment

Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnificent new movie One Battle After Another arrived in theatres last week, but it was made in the America that existed before Donald Trump's return. Watching it, I kept wondering if such a forthrightly antifascist film could be produced in Hollywood today.

- Michelle Goldberg

US Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino leads his troops as they confront demonstrators outside of an immigrant processing centre in Broadview, Illinois, on Saturday.

(SCOTT OLSON / GETTY IMAGES VIA AFP)

A political thriller shot through with absurdist humour, the movie has several scenes that might have seemed imaginatively dystopian when they were shot, but now look like news outtakes. Its villain, a military officer named Steven Lockjaw, is an anti-immigrant fanatic who at one point lays siege to a sanctuary city under the dishonest pretext of fighting cartels.

The movie posits a white nationalist cabal at the highest levels of the American establishment — called, amusingly, the Christmas Adventurers — whose rhetoric isn’t all that different from Mr Trump's. “Our aim and your aim is the same,” one member says to Lockjaw, who aspires to join them. “To find dangerous lunatics, haters and punk trash and stop them. No more lunatics.”

One Battle After Another has been rapturously reviewed, and the critics are right — it’s the best new movie I've seen in years. The film's artistic success shouldn’t be reduced to its politics. But at a moment when an autocratic administration is trying to force cultural institutions into submission, it's invigorating to see a Hollywood movie so fearless in its progressive convictions. One Battle After Another has complicated things to say about left-wing political violence and self-serving radicalism, but it takes a clear side in the broader fight between authoritarianism and resistance.

Anderson's movie was loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s