162 min | R | September 26, 2025 | Warner Bros.
PTA’s Pynchon adaptation is a tonal mess wrapped in prestige packaging. Great performances buried inside a film that can’t decide if it’s a comedy or an epic.
I wanted to love this. Paul Thomas Anderson adapting Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” with this cast should be an event. Instead it’s a 162-minute exercise in tonal whiplash. One scene plays like broad slapstick. The next goes for deadly serious stakes. The movie never finds a rhythm between those two modes. It just lurches back and forth hoping the audience stays on board.
The performances are the saving grace. Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti both deliver work that demands more screen time. They bring focus and energy that the sprawling narrative desperately needs. Regina Hall polishes every scene she touches. She finds the real human moments in dialogue that could easily go flat. DiCaprio and del Toro do solid work, but the script spreads itself too thin across too many characters to give anyone a complete arc.
Sean Penn’s Lockjaw is the biggest misfire. The character is written as a cartoonish villain cranked to eleven. Penn commits fully, which only makes the problem worse. There’s no weight to the threat because there’s no depth to the menace. He’s a caricature in a film that sometimes wants to be taken seriously. You can’t invest in a villain whose only note is “maniacal.”
The action hits the right balance. Not too much spectacle, not too little. Anderson knows how to stage set pieces that serve the story. That craft is real. But the good-versus-evil framing feels primitive for a director this talented. The coda is intriguing but doesn’t redeem the structural problems.
The Academy will eat this up. The DGA already did. But 94% on Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t change the fact that this film asks for nearly three hours and doesn’t earn all of them. Anderson has made better films. This one has moments of brilliance surrounded by a movie that can’t get out of its own way.