Now that the political scene in the contemporary United States looks like an unending string of military PR coups for the Trumpian right at home and abroad, it’s appropriate that Paul Thomas Anderson’s spectacular, mysterious counterculture epic One Battle After Another – with Leonardo DiCaprio as a clueless, dishevelled ex-revolutionary – should consolidate its current position as one of the leading movies of this awards season: winning four Globes including best musical or comedy and best director for Paul Thomas Anderson – whose fluency, productivity and pure technique and ambition are arguably making him America’s pre-eminent film-maker. The excellent Teyana Taylor got best supporting actress.
This is a movie scene in which no mainstream is directly attacking the Trump regime head-on (such as, say, Ali Abbasi’s satirical Trump biopic The Apprentice) but there is something in Anderson’s film that inhales and intuits both the current febrile mood of reactionary hysteria and the tension and depression of those opposing it. Sean Penn wasn’t up for any Globes last night for his role as the bullish and yet pathetic Col Lockjaw in One Battle After Another, the oppressor despised by his masters, but I see a great deal of Lockjaw in Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, the disposable courtiers uneasily standing ramrod straight behind the president at public events.
Yin to that picture’s yang was Chloé Zhao’s impassioned romantic fantasy Hamnet, which wins best drama and best actress for Jessie Buckley as William Shakespeare’s wife Agnes or Anne Hathaway: Buckley’s award was very well earned, she was the heart and soul of a film which boldly, perhaps even heretically, reached back into the past and speculatively invented William and Agnes’s anguish at the death of their son and created a new fiction that this bereavement fed into Shakespeare’s Hamlet or even governed its creation, almost line by line.
It’s not intended as a documentary, but rather a kind of folk myth: for some Hamnet is pedantic and coercive, but I responded to its vehemence, its creative intelligence and its mystery and it’s great to see Buckley rewarded at the Globes.
Elsewhere, Josh Safdie’s hellzapoppin’ pingpong comedy Marty Supreme landed Timothée Chalamet his first Globe for actor in a musical or comedy after years of losing out – and it’s an amazing, exhilarating performance from Chalamet, his needy hyperactivity and charm entirely in tune with the rest of the film. What an amazing and distinctive actor Chalamet is, buzzing with energy and movie-star like a plucked guitar string.
Nervousness and jittery high anxiety was also the performance keynote in Rose Byrne’s turn in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, for which she was the winner of best actress in a comedy or musical, beating big hitters like Cynthia Erivo and Emma Stone. Certainly 2026 is the unhappy year for this kind of existential disquiet.
It was great to see two Globes going to a film which I think was the best of last year: Kleber Mendonca Filho’s Brazilian movie The Secret Agent, about a scientist on the run from the authorities in 1970s Brazil – it was best non-English language film and Wagner Moura was the night’s winner of best actor in a drama for playing the lead. Perhaps all the obviously big male acting contenders were in the musical/comedy category but nonetheless it was great to see this excellent actor get an award.
This was a good list for an award ceremony which has been tarnished by the Golden Globes’s various scandals over membership non-diversity and bribes, although the resulting prizes were never obviously much different from those of other awarding bodies and sometimes more diverse. Some tonight will be very disappointed that Ryan Coogler’s Sinners was not rewarded more than it was – Sinners was not my favourite Coogler film, though I think it’s a shame that Delroy Lindo couldn’t get a supporting actor Globe for his performance.
This was an intelligent and serious list of prizewinners, leaving the Oscar field open between One Battle After Another, Hamnet and the delirious Marty Supreme.
