Leonardo DiCaprio joined the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson, Mick Jagger, and Jeremy Irons to celebrate hit film One Battle After Another in an unassuming London pub.
The film, directed by Anderson, sees DiCaprio, 51, star as aging revolutionary Bob Ferguson, living in hiding with daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti).
His life is thrown into disarray when he and his fellow members of the French 75 are tracked down by Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and his crew, forcing him to find Willa when she is kidnapped.
One Battle After Another was met by overwhelming praise from cinemagoers and critics alike, currently boasting a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
To celebrate its success, a starry selection of guests descended on The Hart Pub, with DiCaprio rubbing shoulders with rock royalty Jagger for the occasion.
Other guests in attendance included Lolita actor Irons as well as James Bond icon Pierce Brosnan and his son Dylan, who appeared in good spirits at the bash smiling for photos.
Olivia Wilde, Hannah Waddingham, Richard Gadd, and Charlie Brooker were also among the stars at the celebration.
It comes after DiCaprio attended an in-conversation event at BFI Southbank for One Battle After Another.
Speaking at the event, as reported by The Daily Mail, the Titanic actor heaped praise on director Anderson and explained how he got involved with the project.
‘One of the fundamentally great things about Paul is he puts a tremendous amount of thought into what he does and I feel like he kind of stews over ideas, and obviously that later manifests itself on screen,’ he began.
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‘But I remember [first] having a conversation with him years ago. He kind of casually came up to visit me and my friend [actor] Lukas [Haas], at my place and we were just kind of talking.
‘It wasn’t particularly about a project, but I could tell he was tuning his fork. There was a reference to maybe working together sometime in the distant future, like this ominous cloud, and I said to my friend Lukas, ‘Do you think we’re talking about a project? I have no idea.’
He said that from there, ‘conversations started to build’ and the film slowly got off the ground.
From there, it has received a flurry of five-star reviews from several critics, and has been labelled a ‘masterpiece’ by many.
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Metro’s film editor Tori Brazier gives their verdict on One Battle After Another
For me, One Battle After Another is not the film of the year – and the hype kind of ruined it.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that it’s a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. I still absolutely recommend it – just with the suggestion that maybe everyone should calm down a bit.
DiCaprio, who has never knowingly turned in anything less than an excellent performance, is on top form as a hapless ex-revolutionary who’s smoked so much weed over the years that he’s incapable of doing much more than sitting on the sofa watching old films via his VHS player.
His character Bob is pathetic, but we still cheer for him when he has any kind of breakthrough on his frantic journey to try and rescue his missing daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) – beginning with the monumental struggle to remember one of the passwords on the phone that will unlock communications properly with his old far-left outfit, the French 75.
DiCaprio gets to demonstrate his exquisite knack for playing frustration as well as exercise his funny bone in One Battle After Another, which is at once both a timely political thriller and brutal black comedy.
I have no problem with this jarring but exhilarating mash-up of genres at all; I can certainly get onboard with other critics praising it as a refreshing, out-of-pocket style of film. Why should movies play by the rules of strict genre?
In their review, AV Club wrote: ‘One Battle After Another hurtles into the present without compromising Anderson’s sense of fractured, constantly rearranged, weirdly personal American history.’
Observer said: ‘Anderson, at his best, represents a cinema of big swings and bold statements. Perhaps not everything lands, but there’s enough that does to make this glorious mess of a movie one of the most thrilling cinema events of the year.’
Slate branded it ‘a brainy meditation on our dystopian present’, while Newsday said it was a ‘funhouse-mirror view of extremist politics.’
Meanwhile, Financial Times added: ‘Movies of nearly three hours don’t usually come with such sustained tick-tock grip. You risk palpitations, but the filmmaking is seamless. The whole picture shares the same dual identity — delirious and deadly serious.’
One Battle After Another can be rented and brought via Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, the Sky Store, and Rakuten TV. It is also available in select cinemas
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