Author Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho) is calling out the acclaimed critical response to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” which is the highest-rated film of 2025 so far.

While Ellis is a big fan of Anderson–“There Will Be Blood” is “maybe the best film of this century”–the author claimed critics have heaped praise on “One Battle After Another” because the film’s politics align with the left.

Significantly, it is the first Anderson film in three decades to cross the $100 million benchmark, and a frontrunner in the upcoming Oscars race.

“It’s kind of shocking to see these kind of accolades for — I’m sorry, it’s not a very good movie — because of its political ideology, and it’s so obvious that’s what they’re responding to,” Ellis said on “The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast” about the critical reaction to Anderson’s latest.

“It’s considered a masterpiece, the greatest film of the decade, or the greatest film ever made because it really aligns with this kind of leftist sensibility.”

Ellis predicted the movie will soon be seen as “a kind of musty relic of the post-Kamala Harris era — that thing everyone gathers around and pretends is so fantastic and so great when it really isn’t, just to make a point… There’s a liberal mustiness to this movie that already feels very dated by October 2025. Very dated. And it just doesn’t read the room. You know, it reads a tiny corner of the room, but it does not read what is going on in America.”

Responding to one film critic who called “One Battle After Another” an “important” movie, Ellis sais, “No, it is not. It has not read the room at all about what’s going on in America.”

One Battle After Another’ is a vision of a society in captivity, but it’s a movie that never loses its humanity.

Since opening in theaters on September 26, One Battle After Another has earned $114 million and counting at the worldwide box office.