LIEL LEIBOVITZ: ‘One Battle After Another’ Is Irredeemable.

Walking out of One Battle After Another, I realized that the cavalry wasn’t coming. [Wes] Anderson is just another mindless mediocrity now, thinking first about party lines and only then, if at all, about truth and beauty. It’s all over.

Which, hallelujah, is very good news.

Because if you know anything about the history of Hollywood, you know that great thrusts of creativity and daring come only when the industry drives itself to the brink of extinction. In the late 1950s, for example, terrified by the ascent of TV, studios made a bevy of utterly forgettable spectaculars they hoped would draw people to the theaters. None did. The golden age was over. But slowly, slowly, working in smaller outfits and taking greater risks, a new generation of outsiders started telling the kinds of stories the Old Hollywood would’ve never approved of. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and their cohorts delivered films that were far more raw and daring and impactful than anything we’d ever seen before, giving American cinema another, brighter golden age.

Now that even the greats have fallen, now that even Paul Thomas Anderson seems interested more in purring for his fellow progressives than in making interesting movies, now that even DiCaprio is relegated to delivering lines about respecting another character’s “they/them” gender pronouns, it should be crystal clear that Hollywood has once again driven itself to total moral, artistic, and creative ruin. How lucky are we: Somewhere out there, I bet, some young punk feels liberated and called to make Hollywood great again.

Hollywood has been here before of course, issuing ridiculous slop when they believed the cultural revolution was nigh that suddenly looks very silly once the dust clears: Mystery Seventies Theater 3000.