| The film One Battle After Another landed in theaters last week at the best—or worst?—possible time. There’s a lot for moviegoers to chew over, writes Businessweek’s Mark Leydorf. Plus: 10 companies to watch in the fourth quarter. But first, catch up with Bloomberg News on the government shutdown. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.  The Capitol on Wednesday morning. Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The US federal government is officially in a shutdown. The White House’s budget office has ordered agencies to begin executing their plans for a funding lapse, disrupting the jobs of hundreds of thousands of Americans and upending many public services. Those plans will vary depending on the role of the agency and the length of the shutdown. For example, National Park Service leaders have been instructed to keep most parks open, according to a memo viewed by Bloomberg Businessweek. You can read more about the government playbook here. And you can listen to a Q&A from Bloomberg journalists. President Donald Trump said “a lot of good” could stem from the shutdown and suggested many federal workers would be outright fired and not furloughed, as usually happens in this situation. Investors’ expectations for the next few days are based on past shutdowns. As Wes Kosova wrote in this newsletter yesterday, the shock value has worn off, as this is the 15th closure since 1980. To resolve the impasse, Democrats are seeking to extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans and restore some Medicaid funding cut earlier this year. In Bloomberg Opinion, columnist Lisa Jarvis writes about the cost of not doing so. A Movie That Doesn’t Shy From the Moment |  Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson in One Battle After Another. Source: Warner Bros. Pictures Early on in One Battle After Another, Perfidia Beverly Hills, a very pregnant Black revolutionary, fires off a machine gun at a shooting range. The scene has turned the terrific actress who plays her, Teyana Taylor, into an instant cinematic legend. The audience I was sitting in on Saturday night collectively gasped. This movie isn’t playing around. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, the auteur behind The Master, Phantom Thread and other cerebral critical darlings, has made a high-octane thriller. Stuffed with edgy performances, shot in expansive VistaVision and crafted for maximum adrenaline, it opened wide on Sept. 26, making $22 million in the US in its first weekend. But a lot of the audience is squirming in their seats. Thanks partly to an accident of timing, Battle—whose heroes are basically Donald Trump’s fantasy of antifa brought to life—may be the most important movie of the year. It stormed into theaters just days after the president issued a legally dubious executive order declaring “antifa” a terrorist organization and a few weeks after the assassination of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk. Here’s the thing, though. Production wrapped on Battle in July 2024, before Trump was reelected. How did Anderson know? And with the president making war on the Walt Disney Co. and the New York Times, why did Warner Bros. decide to pull the trigger on a film about leftist political violence? The think pieces are flying. The National Review’s right-wing Armond White despised the film: “Anderson intentionally provokes the bloodlust of his woke confreres.” On the left, the Guardian’s Ellen Jones called the director out for fetishizing Black women in a “hyper-sexualised way beyond the normal horniness that firework-lighting in the company of late-era Leonardo DiCaprio might arouse.” But Michelle Goldberg, the center-left New York Times columnist, nails the consensus, writing that Battle 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.” The director tinkered for years with this script, based loosely on Vineland, Thomas Pynchon’s sprawling novel about revolutionaries. (Among other things, the novel’s title refers to the birthplace of White supremacy, the first Viking settlement in North America.) Believing Trump 2.0 was inevitable, Anderson may have felt the time was ripe for a movie about radicals fighting a racist government. Mind you, antifa isn’t an actual organization but a broad movement of leftist groups that have become more active in the Trump era. For that matter, fascism (the “fa” in “antifa”) isn’t an organized entity either; our politicians, left and right, have been battling ideas since long before George W. Bush declared his war on terror. The fictional French 75, the leftist group at the heart of Battle—named after the cocktail the resistance fighters in Casablanca drink—is an organization with broad aims. In the film’s opening, Perfidia leads a raid to liberate an ICE detention camp; next the group blows up an empty courthouse to protest an abortion ban. But when French 75’s nemesis, Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), captures Perfidia and assassinates other members, the rest of the group, including Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio)—her lover and an explosives specialist—goes into hiding. We then jump ahead 16 years, to the backwoods cabin where Bob is struggling to raise their teenage daughter, Willa (Chance Infiniti). Suddenly, Lockjaw has intel on Bob and Willa’s whereabouts. With the help of Willa’s preternaturally chill karate sensei (Benicio Del Toro), they escape—only to spend the rest of the film on the run. This is heavy stuff, but the movie is disarmingly light. Our hero, for starters, is more The Big Lebowski than Casablanca: Bob wears a limp, a greasy man-bun, a filthy bathrobe and a halo of marijuana smoke, just like the Dude in the Coen brothers’ classic. Battle may be on the side of the resistance, but its dopey, stoned protagonist is more suited to right-wing caricature than leftist propaganda. Not that Anderson’s villains fare much better. Lockjaw is a vicious bigot who’s keen to join a secretive White Power group, the hilariously named Christmas Adventures Club. They gather in gilded ballrooms and plot to wipe out the “dangerous lunatics, the haters and punk trash.” Lockjaw (and Penn’s jaw seems actually locked) is tightly wound around the hypocrisy at his core: He’s a White supremacist with a race kink, and he’s smitten with Perfidia. Racism is America’s origin story. After centuries it has transcended tragedy and become a terrifying farce. The friend I saw One Battle After Another with was so upset by it that he had to skip dinner and go home. “That’s the best film I’ve seen in years,” he told me. “But I feel like we’re headed for a civil war.” | 
