What is so special about Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie?

“One Battle After Another” opens tonight in previews and tomorrow officially. It has a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and is destined for lots of awards nominations, especially Oscars.

Tracking puts opening weekend around $25 million. It doesn’t matter, really. “One Battle” is a long term project. It will play to good audiences until early December when those nominations come rolling in.

PTA’s most accessible movie, “One Battle” stars Leonardo Di Caprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Benicio del Toro, and Chase Infiniti, all of whom have been doing Q&A’s all over New York for various guilds and groups.

This past Sunday, the group sat for one at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater for press and patrons of the New York Film Festival. When you see the film, keep some of this in mind.

“One Battle” is such a rollicking film — two hours, 40 minutes fly by.  “One Battle” never rests. Everyone is in motion all the time, running, jumping, rolling, shooting, crashing cars. It might be the first action comedy with a political message.

Toward the end of the Q&A, Film Society chief Dennis Lim asked actress Regina Hall, who plays Deandra,  a key shadowy figure in the film: “I saw an interview you did maybe like a few days ago, where you said that when you read Paul’s scripts he doesn’t really describe those sequences, he just writes, ‘chaos, TBD.’  What’s it like to experience  ‘chaos, TBD’?” (Editor’s note: To Be Determined.)

Hall — who’s got a pretty hefty resume under belt including a 2018 Best Actress Award from the New York Film Critics Circle — said:  “It’s pretty exciting. It was chaos in perfect art form, but in a way that my imagination didn’t have.  But I think that’s what’s amazing about Paul. There’s a film that lives inside of his head, like visually, and it’s pretty spectacular  to watch it, you know, become live.”

DiCaprio plays the central character, Bob Ferguson, a kind of everyman who’s  the audience’s guide through the chaos. He added: “I would just only add that TBD is a very  important thing because the whole film is TBD.”

Two time Oscar winner Sean Penn told me later he had no idea how he came up with the unusual walk that marks his violent, racist, really tragic character, the antagonist — one of Penn’s finest roles. He seems actually shocked this hideous Colonel Lockjaw is being embraced by audiences.

At the Q&A Penn said: “I think that I’ve been more value-added to a project  when I’ve had the experience of kind of early in the reading of the script the first time,  sort of hearing the music of a character.  And this one, Paul would only know how much I interpreted  and how much he wrote me literally or subliminally to hear the music that way.“

Here’s the final trailer for “Wicked: For Good,” coming in November.

Big box office, many awards nominations are on the horizon. Two new songs also, written for this film by Stephen Schwartz.

Here’s what happens in this part two:
Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), now demonized as The Wicked Witch of the West, lives in exile, hidden within the Ozian forest while continuing her fight for the freedom of Oz’s silenced Animals and desperately trying to expose the truth she knows about The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum).

Glinda, meanwhile, has become the glamorous symbol of Goodness for all of Oz, living at the palace in Emerald City and reveling in the perks of fame and popularity. Under the instruction of Madame Morrible (Oscar® winner Michelle Yeoh), Glinda is deployed to serve as an effervescent comfort to Oz, reassuring the masses that all is well under the rule of The Wizard.

As Glinda’s stardom expands and she prepares to marry Prince Fiyero (Olivier award winner and Emmy and SAG nominee Jonathan Bailey) in a spectacular Ozian wedding, she is haunted by her separation from Elphaba. She attempts to broker a conciliation between Elphaba and The Wizard, but those efforts will fail, driving Elphaba and Glinda only further apart. The aftershocks will transform Boq (Tony nominee Ethan Slater) and Fiyero forever, and threaten the safety of Elphaba’s sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), when a girl from Kansas comes crashing into all their lives.

As an angry mob rises against the Wicked Witch, Glinda and Elphaba will need to come together one final time. With their singular friendship now the fulcrum of their futures, they will need to truly see each other, with honesty and empathy, if they are to change themselves, and all of Oz, for good.