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Everything Everywhere All at Once

2022, Comedy/Adventure, 2h 12m

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Critics Consensus

Led by an outstanding Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once lives up to its title with an expertly calibrated assault on the senses. Read critic reviews

Audience Says

Incredible acting, stunning visuals, and a really deep, powerful story -- Everything Everywhere All at Once has it all. Read audience reviews

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Everything everywhere all at once videos, everything everywhere all at once   photos.

Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels, the film is a hilarious and big-hearted sci-fi action adventure about an exhausted Chinese American woman (Michelle Yeoh) who can't seem to finish her taxes.

Rating: R (Sexual Material|Language|Some Violence)

Genre: Comedy, Adventure, Sci-fi, Fantasy

Original Language: English

Director: Dan Kwan , Daniel Scheinert

Producer: Joe Russo , Anthony Russo , Mike Larocca , Dan Kwan , Daniel Scheinert , Jonathan Wang

Writer: Dan Kwan , Daniel Scheinert

Release Date (Theaters): Apr 8, 2022  wide

Rerelease Date (Theaters): Jul 29, 2022

Release Date (Streaming): Jun 7, 2022

Box Office (Gross USA): $76.7M

Runtime: 2h 12m

Distributor: A24

Production Co: Ley Line Entertainment, IAC Films, AGBO

Sound Mix: Stereo, Dolby Digital, Dolby Atmos

Aspect Ratio: Flat (1.85:1)

Cast & Crew

Michelle Yeoh

Evelyn Wang

Stephanie Hsu

Joy Wang, Jobu Tupaki

Ke Huy Quan

Waymond Wang

Jamie Lee Curtis

Deirdre Beaubeirdra

Jenny Slate

Debbie the Dog Mom

Harry Shum Jr.

Daniel Scheinert

Screenwriter

Anthony Russo

Mike Larocca

Jonathan Wang

Tim Headington

Executive Producer

Theresa Steele Page

Todd Makurath

Josh Rudnick

Larkin Seiple

Cinematographer

Paul Rogers

Film Editor

Original Music

Jason Kisvarday

Production Design

Amelia Brooke

Art Director

News & Interviews for Everything Everywhere All at Once

25 Memorable Movie Lines of the Last 25 Years

Everything Everywhere All at Once Broke Oscar Winner Michelle Yeoh’s Brain

Awards Leaderboard: Top Movies of 2022

Critic Reviews for Everything Everywhere All at Once

Audience reviews for everything everywhere all at once.

A wildly ambitious and ambitiously weird movie, this takes the multiverse concept to new heights in the strangest way. Presenting a normal person confronted with the multiverse is already a fun idea, but then we are presented with writer/director Daniels signature brand of oddness in how they deal with the multiverse and it's pretty fantastic. Does it all work? Does it all make sense? No, but does it all need to? Not really. Its emotional core is strong, its humor is solid, and its ambition is through the roof.

An amusing bit of populist surrealism (Yeah it is weird but the movie is still grounded in very easily communicated themes and character arcs) that gives the great cast a chance to show their range.

Absolutely incredible. This is the type of filmmaking that truly hits all the right notes for me. At its core is a heartfelt dramedy set on the premise of a high concept modern sci fi full of quirky visual style and well choreographed martial arts. While simultaneously blasting the audience with powerful themes of self-discovery and familial relationships. I also want to talk about the hints of HK cinema in it, where a lot of scenes feel inspired by Jackie Chan and Stephen Chow sensibilities but feel driven so much further with complex character stories that not only make you weep but laugh with joy. "Everything, Everywhere, All at once" is so fresh, zany and bizarre yet holds an audience's heart so closely with its themes that its authenticity is unquestionable. It makes you want to love yourself and those around you just a little more, if not at least giving them a chance. If you're going to see one movie this year please make it this one and then tell your friends to see it too. We don't need more giant franchise movies seeing success, we need more of whatever the hell this is.

Even after only two movies, I would trust the directing duo Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) with any movie. They have earned a lifetime pass from me. If these men can make the farting corpse of Harry Potter not just one of the weirdest movies of 2016, not just one of the best films of that year, but also one of the most insightful toward the human condition, then these men can do anything. It's been six long years for a follow-up but it sure has been worth it. Everything Everywhere All At Once is, to be pithy, a whole lot of movie. Everything Everywhere (my preferred shorthand from here) is a miracle of a movie. It's a wonder that something this bizarre, this wild, this juvenile, this ambitious, and this specific in vision could find its way through the dream-killing factory that is Hollywood moviemaking. This is the kind of movie you celebrate for simply existing, something so marvelously different but so assured, complex but accessible, and deliriously, amazingly creative. I'm throwing out a lot of adjectives and adverbs to describe the experience of this movie and that's because it filled me with such sheer wonder and divine happiness. I am thankful that the Danirels are making their movies on their terms, and two movies into what I hope is a long and uncompromising career, I can tell that both of these gentlemen deserve all the accolades and plaudits they have coming. I'll try my best not to sound like a simpering moron while I try to explain why this movie is so thoroughly outstanding. Evelyn (Michelle Yeaoh) is a middle-aged Chinese immigrant who is taking stock of her disappointing life. She and her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), own a floundering coin-operated laundromat. They're under audit by a dogged IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis). Evelyn's disapproving father, Gong Gong (James Hong, still so great even into his 90s), has moved from China to live with the family, and he was never a fan of Waymond, looking down on his daughter for marrying the man. Then there's Joy (Stephanie Hsu), Evelyn and Waymond's twenty-something daughter, who wants to bring her girlfriend to dinner but mom still doesn't accept her daughter's queerness and uses the excuse of Gong Gong's generational disapproval. Then, at the IRS agency, Waymond's body is taken over by another Waymond, Alpha Waymond, who informs Evelyn that she is the key to saving a universe of universes, and she'll have to tap into her alternate selves and their abilities to battle the evil destroyer, Jobu Tupaki, who wants to destroy all existence, and who also happens to be an alternate universe version of Joy. Multiverses are definitely all the rage right now as they present nostalgic cash-grabs and cameos galore, but Everything Everywhere is a multiverse that is personal and specific. It's based on all the paths the protagonist never took, and each allows her confirmation of what her life could have been, often more glamorous or exciting or initially appealing. A movie star. A famous singer. A ballerina. A skilled chef. Evelyn is a character paralyzed by the disappointment of her life's choices, the malaise that has settled in, and the nagging feeling that things could have and should have been better. In one of the best jokes early on, Evelyn is told she's the Chosen One not because she is special but because she is, literally, living the worst of all possible lives of the multiverse of Evelyns (then again the pinata Evelyn didn't look like an upgrade). She has taken all the many bad paths and dead ends, but this positions her as the only one who has the power to tap into every other power and ability from her multiverse duplicates. It's one thing to be feeling like you should have made a different choice in the past, and it's another to get confirmation. This backhanded revelation could just serve as its own joke but it actually transforms into a philosophy that coalesces in the final act, that of all the universes and possibilities we could have had, the best one is the one we are actually present for. In another universe, one very much styled like In the Mood for Love, where a Waymond who was rejected by Evelyn long ago reconnects with her, mournful of what could have been, and says, "In another life, I would have really liked doing laundry and taxes with you," in reference to Evelyn's dismissive summation of what his unrequited romantic "what if" would have lead to. It's such a poignant moment. By the end of the movie, it's become a journey of self-actualization but tied to self-acceptance, where kindness and empathy are the real super weapons and the answer to the tumult of postmodern nihilism. Smartly, the Daniels have made sure that a universe-hopping threat is actually connected to our hero in a meaningful manner. By making the villain an alternate version of Joy, it raises the stakes and forces Evelyn to have to confront her own parenting miscues and frayed relationship with her daughter. It's the kind of decision-making that reinforces the emotional and thematic core of a movie that is spinning so fast that it feels like you might fall off and vomit new colors. Joy is an avatar of generational disconnect, inherited disappointment and resentment, but what really makes her relatable is the growing feeling of being over it all. Given the power to see everything in every universe, Joy concludes that life is overwhelming and without meaning. It's the same sort of nihilism we might feel today as we doom scroll through our phones, eyes glazed over from the barrage of bad news, outraged click bait, and feeling of abject helplessness while the world spins on in an uncertain direction. It's not hard to feel, as Joy, that it's all too much to bear, and if she can experience everything then does it present value to anything? If she can always just sidestep to another universe, what does that do to the value of life? That's the ethical conundrum with Rick and Morty, a show where they can swap characters from other dimensions to fix more costly mistakes. What Daniels attempts with Everything Everywhere is to tackle the same question but approaching a different answer: that despite everything, life matters, our relationships matter, and kindness and empathy matter most. Watching Evelyn and Joy, and their many different versions of mother and daughter, try to reach an understanding, it's easy to feel that struggle and relate to wanting to feel seen. As Evelyn encouragingly says to one character at their lowest point, "It is too much to handle, yes. But nobody is ever alone." This is a dozen different kinds of movies, all smashed together, and each of them is utterly delightful and skillfully realized and executed. If you like martial arts action, there are some excellent fight sequences including a showstopper where Waymond wrecks a team of security guards with a fanny pack. The action is exciting and the martial arts choreography is impressive and filmed in a pleasing style that allows us to really appreciate the moves and countermoves. If you like wild comedies, there are many outlandish moments that combine low-humor and highbrow references. I'll simply refer to one as finding payoffs for IRS auditor trophies shaped like butt plugs. This is one of the funniest American comedies in years. If you like family dramas, there is plenty of conflict across the board between Evelyn and Waymond and Joy, plus the specter of Gong Gong, and each person trying to communicate their dissatisfaction and desires for a better life. If you removed all of the crazy sci-fi elements, googly eyes, people's heads turning to confetti, and what have you, this would still be a compelling human drama. When the movie isn't working through ridiculous tangents, or eye-popping action, or a staggering combination of kitsch and intelligence, it's building out its emotional core, the heart of the movie, the thing that makes all the gee-whiz fun matter, the family in flux. Likewise, this is a powerfully optimistic movie, life-affirming in all the best ways without being pandering, and one that is without any flash of ironic condescension. Sincerity is powerful and all over. The movie is elevated even higher by the strength of the performances. Yeoh (Crazy Rich Asians) has spent decades as a martial arts master, and of late she's been branching out in more demanding dramas, but this is easily the finest performance of her career for nothing less than playing a dozen different characters. She is sensational. The early Evelyn is full of despair and regret, and as she gets to explore each new version of herself, there's an excitement that's bristling, as she gets to see the successes she could have been and celebrate. Yeaoh is hilarious and deeply affecting in the central role and still very much a badass. She showcases starting range, it makes you weep that she has never gotten to play so many different kinds of roles because she's so good at all of them. Hsu (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) is the wounded soul, and her sneers and seen-it-all attitude are killer without losing track of the pain at the core of the character. Her emotional confrontations with her mother still hit hard. But the secret weapon of this movie is Quan, the former child actor best remembered as playing Data in The Goonies and Short Round in Temple of Doom. Yes, that same actor. He too gets to play such a wide, wild variety of Waymonds, from the doting and meek husband, to the confidant warriors, to the smoldering former flame, but with each new Waymond, Quan makes you fall in love with the original more. The character of Waymond and his central philosophy of kindness is so moving and needed, that we almost get to fall in love and re-evaluate this man the same way Evelyn does. Also of note, Curtis (Knives Out) is having an absolute blast as her menacing IRS agent. It's truly amazing to me that a movie can have some of the silliest, craziest, dumbest humor imaginable, and then find ways to tie it back thematically and make it yet another important thread that intricately ties into the overall impact of the movie. The genius of Daniels is marrying the most insane ideas with genuine pathos. Take for instance that one of the many multiverses involves people with hot dogs instead of fingers. It's a goofy visual, and it could simply have been that, a passing moment to make you smile, but the Daniels don't stop there. They continue developing their ideas, all of their ideas, and find additional jokes and purposes few could. Okay, so this is a big divergence from history, so how could humans evolve to have hot dogs for fingers? Well the movie actually showcases this moment in a hilarious 2001: A Space Odyssey reference. And then the film says, "Well, if this was the way of life, what other practices would evolve from here when it comes to communication and intimacy?" It's that level of development and commitment that blows me away. The same with what starts as Evelyn's misunderstanding of the Pixar movie Ratatouille. It works just as a joke in the moment, but then it comes back as its own reality, and even that reality has a thematic resonance by the end. This level of imagination, to take the weirdest jokes and make them meaningful, is special. In one second, I can cry laughing from a raccoon and in the next second a rock can make me want to cry. In essence, even though Everything Everywhere is beyond stuffed, nothing is merely disposable. That doesn't mean that the film doesn't also fall victim to repetition at points. My only criticism, and it might even be eliminated entirely after a second viewing, is that Daniels can over indulge when it comes to their narrative points. Some things can get stretched out, so that they hit points with five beats when three could have been sufficient. It's this kind of mentality that pushes the running time to almost two hours and twenty minutes, which feels a bit extended. However, the messiness and overstuffed nature of the movie is also one of its hallmarks, so I don't know if this criticism will even register for many, especially if you're fully on board their wacky wavelength. If you can, please go into Everything Everywhere All At Once knowing as little as possible. The carousel of surprise and amazement is constant, but the fact that there is a strong emotional core, that all the many stray elements become perfectly braided together, no matter how ridiculous, is all the more impressive. This is stylized filmmaking that is very personal while also being accessible and universal in its existential pains and longing. It's style and substance and exhilarating and genius and emotionally cathartic and moving and everything we want with movies. It's the kind of movie that reignites your passion for cinema, the kind that delivers something new from the studio system, and the kind that deserves parades in celebration. Simply put, as I said before, this is a miracle of a movie, and you owe it to yourself to feel this blessing. Nate's Grade: A

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Few things in life are certain besides death, taxes, and maybe the never-ending task that is doing laundry. At least that’s where the characters in writer/directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert , collectively known as Daniels, new film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” find themselves initially. That is, until they take an emotional, philosophical, and deeply weird trip through the looking glass into the multiverse and discover metaphysical wisdom along the way. 

In this love letter to genre cinema, Michelle Yeoh gives a virtuoso performance as Evelyn Wang, a weary owner of a laundromat under IRS audit. We first meet her enjoying a happy moment with her husband Waymond ( Ke Huy Quan ) and their daughter Joy ( Stephanie Hsu ). We see their smiling faces reflected in a mirror on their living room wall. As the camera literally zooms through the mirror, Evelyn’s smile fades, now seated at a table awash with business receipts. She’s preparing for a meeting with an auditor while simultaneously trying to cook food for a Chinese New Year party that will live up to the high standards of her visiting father Gong Gong ( James Hong , wiley as ever). 

On top of juggling her father’s visit and the tax audit, Evelyn’s sullen daughter Joy wants to bring her girlfriend Becky ( Tallie Medel ) to the party and her husband wants to talk about the state of their marriage. Just as Evelyn begins to feel overwhelmed by everything happening in her life she’s visited by another version of Waymond from what he calls the Alpha verse. Here humans have learned to “verse jump” and are threatened by an omniverse agent of chaos known as Jobu Tupaki. Soon, Evelyn is thrust into a universe-hopping adventure that has her questioning everything she thought she knew about her life, her failures, and her love for her family. 

Most of the action is set in an IRS office building in Simi Valley (which, as a Californian, had me in stitches), where Evelyn must battle IRS agent Diedre ( Jamie Lee Curtis , having the time of her life), a troop of security guards, and possibly everyone else she’s ever met. Production designer Jason Kisvarday crafts a seemingly endless cubicle-filled office where everything from the blade of a paper trimmer to a butt plug shaped auditor of the year awards become fair game in a battle to save the universe. 

Editor Paul Rogers' breakneck pace matches the script’s frenetic dialogue, with layers of universes simultaneously folding into each other while also propelling Evelyn’s internal journey. Match cuts seamlessly connect the universes together, while playful cuts help emphasize the humor at the heart of the film. 

Born from choices both made and not made, each universe has a distinct look and feel, with winking film references ranging from “ The Matrix ” to “ The Fall ” to “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ” to “In The Mood For Love” to “ Ratatouille .” Even Michelle Yeoh’s own legacy finds its way into the film with loving callbacks to her Hong Kong action film days and the wuxia classic “ Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon .” The fight sequences, choreographed by Andy and Brian Le , have a balletic beauty to them, wisely shot by cinematographer Larkin Seiple in wide shots allowing whole bodies to fill the frame.

Yeoh is the anchor of the film, given a role that showcases her wide range of talents, from her fine martial art skills to her superb comic timing to her ability to excavate endless depths of rich human emotion often just from a glance or a reaction. She is a movie star and this is a movie that knows it. Watching her shine so bright and clearly having a ball brought tears to my eyes more than once.  

Just as Evelyn taps into Yeoh’s iconography, facets of Waymond can be found throughout Quan’s unique career. The comic timing from his childhood roles as Data in “ The Goonies ” and Short Round in “ Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ” echoes in Evelyn’s nebbish husband. His work as a fight coordinator shows through in Alpha’s slick action hero capable of using a fanny pack to take out a group of attackers. Even his time as an assistant director to Wong Kar Wai on “2046” can be found in the universe where he plays the debonair one who got away. Quan tackles these variations with aplomb, bringing pathos to each and serving as a gentle reminder that there's strength in kindness. 

As Evelyn and Waymond’s relationship ebbs and flows in iterations through the multiverses, it’s their daughter Joy who proves to be the lynchpin. In a true breakout performance from Stephanie Hsu, Joy represents a growing generational divide. Joy carries the weight of Evelyn’s fractured relationship with her grandfather and the disappointments of an American dream unattained. Her queerness as foreign to her mother as the country was when she herself first arrived. Her aimlessness a greater disappointment because of all that Eveyln sacrificed for her to have more options in life than she did. This pressure manifests in a rebellion so great it stretches beyond the multiverses into a realm where a giant everything bagel looms like a black hole ready to suck everyone into the void. 

If the void arises from the compounding of generational trauma, the Daniels posit that it can be reversed through the unconditional love passed down through those same generations, if we choose compassion and understanding over judgment and rejection. Chaos reigns and life may only ever make sense in fleeting moments, but it’s those moments we should cherish. Moments of love and camaraderie. Sometimes they happen over time. Sometimes they happen all at once. 

This review was filed from the premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. The film opens on March 25th.

Marya E. Gates

Marya E. Gates is a freelance film and culture writer based in Los Angeles and Chicago. She studied Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley, and also has an overpriced and underused MFA in Film Production. Other bylines include Moviefone, The Playlist, Crooked Marquee, Nerdist, and Vulture. 

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Film credits.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Rated R for some violence, sexual material and language.

139 minutes

Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang

Stephanie Hsu as Joy Wang / Jobu Tupaki

James Hong as Gong Gong

Jonathan Ke Quan as Waymond Wang

Jamie Lee Curtis as Deirdre Beaubeirdra

Anthony Molinari as Police - Confetti

Jenny Slate as Big Nose

Andy Le as Alpha Jumper - Bigger Trophy

Brian Le as Alpha Jumper - Trophy

Daniel Scheinert as District Manager

Harry Shum Jr. as Chad

Boon Pin Koh as Maternity Doctor

• Daniel Scheinert

Cinematographer

• Larkin Seiple
• Paul Rogers

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‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Review: It’s Messy, and Glorious

Michelle Yeoh stars as a stressed-out laundromat owner dragged into cosmic battle and genre chaos.

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By A.O. Scott

The idea of the multiverse has been a conundrum for modern physics and a disaster for modern popular culture. I’m aware that some of you here in this universe will disagree, but more often than not a conceit that promises ingenuity and narrative abundance has delivered aggressive brand extension and the infinite recombination of cliché. Had I but world enough and time, I might work these thoughts up into a thunderous supervillain rant, but instead I’m happy to report that my research has uncovered a rare and precious exception.

That would be “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The filmmakers — who work under the name Daniels and who are best known for the wonderfully unclassifiable “Swiss Army Man” (starring Daniel Radcliffe as a flatulent corpse) — are happy to defy the laws of probability, plausibility and coherence. This movie’s plot is as full of twists and kinks as the pot of noodles that appears in an early scene. Spoiling it would be impossible. Summarizing it would take forever — literally!

But while the hectic action sequences and flights of science-fiction mumbo-jumbo are a big part of the fun (and the marketing), they aren’t really the point. This whirligig runs on tenderness and charm. As in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” or Pixar’s “Inside Out,” the antic cleverness serves a sincere and generous heart. Yes, the movie is a metaphysical multiverse galaxy-brain head trip, but deep down — and also right on the surface — it’s a bittersweet domestic drama, a marital comedy, a story of immigrant striving and a hurt-filled ballad of mother-daughter love.

At the center of it all is Evelyn Wang, played by the great Michelle Yeoh with grace, grit and perfect comic timing. Evelyn, who left China as a young woman, runs a laundromat somewhere in America with her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). Her life is its own small universe of stress and frustration. Evelyn’s father (James Hong), who all but disowned her when she married Waymond, is visiting to celebrate his birthday. An I.R.S. audit looms. Waymond is filing for divorce, which he says is the only way he can get his wife’s attention. Their daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), has self-esteem issues and also a girlfriend named Becky (Tallie Medel), and Evelyn doesn’t know how to deal with Joy’s teenage angst or her sexuality.

The first stretch of “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is played in a key of almost-realism. There are hints of the cosmic chaos to come, in the form of ominous musical cues (the score is by Son Lux) and swiveling camera movements (the cinematography is by Larkin Seiple) — but the mundane chaos of Evelyn’s existence provides plenty of drama.

To put it another way, the Daniels understand that she and her circumstances are already interesting. The key to “Everything” is that the proliferating timelines and possibilities, though full of danger and silliness, don’t so much represent an alternative to reality’s drabness as an extension of its complexity.

Things start to get glitchy as Waymond and Evelyn approach their dreaded meeting with Deirdre, an I.R.S. bureaucrat played with impeccable unpleasantness by Jamie Lee Curtis. Waymond — until now a timid, nervous fellow — turns into a combat-ready space commando, wielding his fanny pack as a deadly weapon. He hurriedly explains to Evelyn that the stability of the multiverse is threatened by a power-mad fiend named Jobu Tupaki, and that Evelyn must train herself to jump between universes to do battle. The leaps are accomplished by doing something crazy and then pressing a button on an earpiece. The tax office turns into a scene of martial-arts mayhem. Eventually, Jobu Tupaki shows up, and turns out to be …

You’ll see for yourself. And I hope you do. The Daniels’ command of modern cinematic tropes is encyclopedic, and also eccentric. As Evelyn zigzags through various universes, she finds herself in a live-action rip-off of “Ratatouille” ; a smoky sendup of Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood For Love” ; a world where humans have hot dogs for fingers and play the piano with their feet; and a child’s birthday party where she is a piñata. That is a small sampling. The philosophical foundation for this zaniness is the notion that every choice Evelyn (and everyone else) has made in her life was an unwitting act of cosmogenesis. The roads not taken blossom into new universes. World without end.

The metaphysical high jinks turn out to rest on a sturdy moral foundation. The multiverse — to say nothing of her own family — may lie beyond Evelyn’s control, but she possesses free will, which means responsibility for her own actions and obligations to the people around her. As her adventures grow more elaborate, she seems at first to be one of those solitary, quasi-messianic movie heroes, “the one” who has the power to face down absolute evil.

Yeoh certainly has the necessary charisma, but “Everything Everywhere” is really about something other than the usual heroics. Nobody is alone in the multiverse, which turns out to be a place where families can work on their issues. And while you are likely be tickled and dazzled by the visual variety and whiz-bang effects, you may be surprised to find yourself moved by the performances. Quan, a child star in the 1980s (in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “Goonies”), has an almost Chaplinesque ability to swerve from clownishness to pathos. Hsu strikes every note in the Gen-Z songbook with perfect poise. And don’t sleep on grandpa: Hong nearly steals the show.

Is it perfect? No movie with this kind of premise — or that title — will ever be a neat, no-loose-ends kind of deal. Maybe it goes on too long. Maybe it drags in places, or spins too frantically in others. But I like my multiverses messy, and if I say that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is too much, it’s a way of acknowledging the Daniels’ generosity.

Everything Everywhere All at Once Rated R. Fighting and swearing. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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There's a multiverse of roads not taken in 'everything everywhere all at once'.

Justin Chang

Michelle Yeoh stars as a woman who suddenly develops the power to leap between parallel universes in the action-adventure-fantasy Everything Everywhere All at Once. A24 hide caption

Michelle Yeoh stars as a woman who suddenly develops the power to leap between parallel universes in the action-adventure-fantasy Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Multiverses are having something of a moment, popping up in recent movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home and upcoming ones like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness . It's refreshing, then, to get a new multiverse movie this week that doesn't spring from the world of comic-book superheroes. It's called Everything Everywhere All at Once — an apt title for a movie that imagines the existence of thousands of alternate timelines, featuring thousands of alternate versions of ourselves. It was written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, also known as Daniels, who seem intent on topping the anything-goes audacity of Swiss Army Man , their 2016 comedy featuring Daniel Radcliffe as a flatulent corpse.

That strain of juvenile humor pops up frequently here: At one point, characters have to make inventive use of a trophy in order to jump from one universe to the next. But for all its gross sight gags and bizarre supernatural conceits, the movie has one pretty coherent purpose: to provide a dazzling actor's showcase for Michelle Yeoh .

In theaters this spring: multiverses, Bat-men, action stars and more

Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang, a Chinese American immigrant who lives in a cramped apartment with her husband, Waymond, played by Ke Huy Quan. It's a stressful time for the Wangs: Evelyn has her hands full bickering with their teenage daughter, Joy — a terrific Stephanie Hsu — and planning a birthday party for her ailing father, played by the great 93-year-old veteran James Hong. On top of that, the family business, a laundromat, is being audited by the IRS. The action really begins at the IRS office where Evelyn meets with their auditor, well played by Jamie Lee Curtis, who urges the Wangs to get their paperwork in order.

Evelyn might think she knows the story of her life, but she doesn't know the half of it. Through an extremely bizarre series of events, she learns about the existence of all those other universes, each with its own version of Evelyn. She also learns that she's the only person who can save the whole multiverse from destruction by some powerful force that has taken hold of her daughter, Joy. (As a story of conflict and reconciliation between an Asian mother and daughter, Everything Everywhere All at Once would make a nifty double bill with the current Pixar fantasy Turning Red .)

'Turning Red' confronts the messiness of adolescence with refreshing honesty

In order to defeat evil, Evelyn must repeatedly jump between her universe and others, sort of like a video-game avatar, and absorb crucial knowledge from those other Evelyns, all of whom represent different paths she could have taken through life. There's Evelyn the Hong Kong movie star, Evelyn the Peking opera singer and Evelyn the teppanyaki chef. Imagine a very long, unusually surreal Choose Your Own Adventure novel in which all the pages have been torn out and glued back together at random, and you'll have some sense of how this movie plays.

All this Matrix -style interdimensional hopping, plus the nonstop martial-arts action and in-your-face slapstick, makes Everything Everywhere All at Once an often frenetic viewing experience, and I checked out more than once the first time I saw it. But there are playful ideas beneath that busy surface. Notably, all those other Evelyns seem to be leading more fulfilling lives than Evelyn the unhappy wife, mom and laundromat owner. This is very much a movie about regret and disappointment, about the frustration of feeling that life's best opportunities have passed you by. It's no wonder that one of Evelyn's timelines pays homage to Wong Kar-wai 's In the Mood for Love , one of the greatest movies ever made about the road not taken.

Adding to that subtext is the casting of Michelle Yeoh, who's one of Asia's top stars but, despite some recent supporting roles in Crazy Rich Asians and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings , has never had the spectacular Hollywood career she's deserved. Directors Kwan and Scheinert are clearly trying to rectify that. This movie is as passionate and exhaustive a love letter to an actor as I've ever seen, and Yeoh's performance combines action, comedy, drama and emotion in ways she's never done before. Ke Huy Quan is working just as hard here as a neglected husband whose reserves of quiet strength Evelyn takes for granted. This is a big comeback role for Quan, whom you may remember as the '80s child star from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies.

For all its cosmic craziness, Everything Everywhere All at Once has a simple emotional message: It's about how the members of this immigrant family learn to cherish each other again. It's also about making peace with the life you've lived — and the ones you haven't. And that sort of sums up how I feel about this funny, messy, moving and often exasperating movie: There may be a better, more focused version of it in some other universe, but I'm still grateful for the one we've got.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once review: Michelle Yeoh surfs the multiverse

The veteran action star is the best thing in directing duo the Daniels' heady, hectic sci-fi thriller.

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

A movie that's title, helpfully, is also pretty much its logline, Everything Everywhere All At Once (in theaters March 25) nearly explodes with its own ideas — a chaotic full-tilt multiverse of hot dog hands and flying Pomeranians rooted (just barely) in a super human performance by Michelle Yeoh .

Everything begins, without a sliver of exposition or even a pause for breath, in a shabby laundromat in suburban Southern California that Yeoh's anxious Evelyn Wang runs with her mild-mannered husband Waymond ( Ke Huy Quan ). The day ahead looks hectic, at best: Her father ( James Hong ) is due to fly in for a New Year celebration, her grown daughter Eleanor ( The Path 's Stephanie Hsu ) wants to officially introduce her girlfriend at the party, and there's a meeting with the IRS somewhere in between that will likely determine the fate of the family's faltering business.

That's Jamie Lee Curtis 's cue to enter as the scowling, square-haired Dierdre Beaubeirdra, the living embodiment of petty bureaucracy. But something odd happens at their appointment: Waymond drags Evelyn into a broom closet, clamps a Bluetooth headset on his wife's ear, and sends her hurtling into another dimension. Whatever can be gleaned from his scant, hurried explanation, it's apparently her job to fight her way out of the building or die trying. (There's also an unsigned divorce petition hanging between them, which vaguely complicates things.)

To take on Dierdre and save the world, or at least this particular world, Evelyn will have to access the infinite other dimensions in which she is a chef, a movie star, a martial arts expert, and bring those skills back to the bland cubicles and hallways of the IRS. She's not alone, though; her loved ones also have their own alternate selves — versions that can turn a fanny pack into a deadly weapon, speak English fluently, or manifest as (why not?) a sentient rock. And to win this ill-defined battle they'll need to transcend their various estrangements, if they can find a way back to one another.

Directing duo Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert ( Swiss Army Man ), collectively known as the Daniels, are clearly dedicated students of cinema: Certain scenes recall the metaphysical razzle-dazzle of the Wachowskis , others the lo-fi quirk of Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze ; one lovely scene in a Hong Kong alleyway seems like a direct tribute to Wong Kar Wai . Their ambition is palpable and their imagination seemingly unfettered; the script (which the pair also cowrote) crackles and spins and throws off sparks like a Catherine wheel, even as it rarely endeavors to make basic sense.

The risk of all that high-flying pandemonium, of course, is that when anything is possible, nothing really matters. It's a fleeting, vicarious thrill to skim through worlds where everyone has wieners for fingers or raccoons make their own soup; time in the Daniels' Madlibs multiverse isn't a flat circle, it's an everything bagel (literally), and the metaphor is apt. It's also frequently maddening, and the actors, particularly the inexhaustible Yeoh, do much of the work to ground what often feels, with its dream logic and layer-cake Inception feints, like a coded story whose secret key you haven't been invited to share. But there are no small bites of the bagel; it's all at once, or not at all. Grade: B–

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Everything Everywhere All at Once Review

A gamechanger for multiverse stories..

Everything Everywhere All at Once was reviewed out of the SXSW Film Festival, where it made its world premiere. It will hit theaters on March 25, 2022.

The multiverse has officially invaded our pop culture landscape, and the idea of seeking characters from alternate realities can be found everywhere. Of course, when reality is so frequently bleak, getting a chance to escape it and get a glimpse of a different universe is ever so appealing. Everything Everywhere All at Once finds fresh soil to plant a complex seed in this conceit, a fresh take on the trend that is truly bizarre, gross, heartfelt, and honest. This is a work of art about staring into the abyss, taking stock of the darkness around us, and choosing kindness over despair. It also features Michelle Yeoh in an alternate dimension where people have giant hot dogs for fingers, so there's that too.

The opening scene introduces the Wangs as a happy Chinese American family through a mirror, before jumping inside said mirror and revealing a deeply dissatisfied and broken family on the other side. Evelyn (Yeoh) is in an unhappy marriage with a stubbornly guileless husband Waymond (the phenomenal Ke Huy Quan) who frustratingly sees the bright side in every situation and convinced her to move to California and find a better life after her overbearing and intimidating father, Gong Gong (James Hong having the time of his life at just 93 years young), forbid their marriage and disowned her. Unbeknownst to Evelyn, Waymond isn't all that happy either, as he hides divorce papers that he tries to muster the courage to give to his wife. Last but not least, Evelyn's daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), is far from an epitome of her own name, with the lack of acknowledgement from Evelyn towards Joy's girlfriend revealing a deep well of under-discussed frustration.

The last straw in a lifetime of being dealt bad hands (when she was born, the doctor apologized to her father for having a baby girl) is that Evelyn's laundromat is being audited by the IRS and the human version of Roz from Monsters, Inc., played by Jamie Lee Curtis in so much makeup and prosthetic work that she could rival Colin Farrell's Penguin . But the audit gets interrupted by an emergency plea for Evelyn to save the entire multiverse from annihilation by tapping into the skills of her more accomplished alternate selves. Why is this Evelyn the one to save them all? Because she is quite literally the least fulfilled, the biggest blank slate of them all; a woman who has failed at every single hobby, dream, and goal she ever attempted.

Yeoh gives what could very well be the best performance of her career thus far as a character going through a deep mid-life crisis. Yeoh not only does a terrific job portraying the emptiness of main Evelyn's life, but she makes every one of her alternate selves feel unique yet recognizable in the different choices they made. Everything Everywhere All at Once firmly acknowledges that once you start thinking about those roads not taken, once you take in everything in your life, everywhere you go, all at once, there is no choice but to realize how pointless it all is. This is a film that feels uniquely made by millennials who see the world around them crumble; it is a painful piece of irony that it’s coming out not only in the middle of a pandemic, but as global political strife intensifies. It’s coincidentally fitting for the specific time period we find ourselves in, even if the filmmakers happened upon this by accident – it’s about thinking things can change for the better, while realizing that trying to change the bleak and hopeless future ahead of us is fruitless. Not since Lars Von Trier's Melancholia has a film so crushingly and accurately depicted clinical depression and the feeling of just wanting to jump into the abyss. And yet, this movie is anything but hopeless. On the contrary, it comes out on the other side with a renewed sense of hope, as it chooses kindness and decency over despair.

What's your favorite Michelle Yeoh movie?

Of course, this is a film by the Daniels, a directing duo who made their feature debut with a movie about a farting corpse whose dick served as a compass — there was simply no way this would be a complete downer. Instead, Everything Everywhere All at Once is also absolutely exhilarating and gross, and full of kick-ass action. The Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) are adept at using toilet humor to convey deep and complex ideas, and this film is full of those. This is a movie where the IRS building is full of dildo-shaped trophies it hands to its employees, where jokes about Disney's Ratatouille can drive the plot forward, and a universe where people who have hot dogs for fingers can lead to one of the most touching romantic scenes ever put in a sci-fi action film.

And make no mistake, this is an action movie – one of the best ones in years at that. Despite running at over two hours, it never stops moving, with the camera acting as an extension of Evelyn's undiagnosed ADHD, always frenetic and kinetic. By tapping into her alternate selves, Evelyn is not only struggling with how her life turned out, but also getting a Millennium Actress -like view of her life in chapters of "what ifs" that celebrate Yeoh's incredible career. The action is also never boring or repetitive as we go from one version of Evelyn who is a martial arts expert, to an opera singer, a chef and even a sign twirler, with the Daniels finding unique situations to put each bizarre skill to deadly use.

Everything Everywhere All at Once also serves as a celebration of Asian cinema at large, with stunning homages to everyone from Wong Kar-Wai to Stephen Chow and Jackie Chan, and even a little Satoshi Kon thrown in for good measure. The result, a film that truly feels like it encompasses everything, everywhere, all at once, is monumental. It’s similar to when The Matrix took all the fears and ideas of its time and turned them into a stylish action film with grand thoughts.

That Everything Everywhere All at Once is produced by previous Marvel mainstays the Russo brothers, and that it comes out while Spider-Man: No Way Home still swings in theaters, is ironic, because with a fraction of its budget, this film makes for an infinitely better multiverse production than any superhero movie has ever gotten close to. While the idea of a multiverse is exciting, for sure, TV and film has so far mostly focused on its wild, big-scale possibilities. But the Daniels manage to both explore the larger, galaxy-brain implications of this concept, while also telling a rather intimate story of feeling like your life is leading nowhere and the world is going to hell, while deciding to embrace the small moments of joy and just be nicer to those around you. This is a film that could only be made now, a movie that encompasses everything, but can be appreciated and understood everywhere, all at once.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a complex film that encompasses a variety of subjects, but it does justice to each of them with a carefully written script, marvelous performances, and a healthy dose of bizarre humor to counter its bleak story. Michelle Yeoh in particular gives a powerhouse performance in a story that puts a fresh, welcome spin on the idea of the multiverse.

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‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Review: ‘The Matrix’ Meets the Multiverse in Daniels’ Instant Classic

David ehrlich.

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Multiverses are so hot right now. And why shouldn’t they be? At a time when people can’t even look at their phones without being confronted by a seemingly infinite number of competing realities — a time which everything seems close enough to touch, but almost nothing feels possible to change, and even the happiest people you know are haunted by the endless possibilities of who else they might have been — telling a story that only takes place on a single plane of existence might as well be an act of denial.

That isn’t a problem for the filmmaking duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (better known as Daniels ), who once created an interactive six-minute short that could be played in 3,618,502,788,666,131,106,986,593,281,521,497,120,414,687,020,801,267,626, 233,049,500,247,285,301,248 different ways . These guys aren’t just uniquely prepared to meet the present moment, they’ve been waiting for it to catch up with them for a long time. So it’s not much of a surprise that the project they’ve been working on since 2016’s “ Swiss Army Man ” sees the crisis of living with “ Everything Everywhere All at Once ” more clearly than any other movie like it.

Not that there are any other movies like it. Here is an orgiastic work of slaphappy genius that doesn’t operate like a narrative film so much as a particle accelerator — or maybe a cosmic washing machine — that two psychotic 12-year-olds designed in the hopes of reconciling the anxiety of what our lives could be with the beauty of what they are. It’s a machine powered by the greatest performance that Michelle Yeoh has ever given, pumped full of the zaniest martial arts battles that Stephen Chow has never shot, and soaked through with the kind of “anything goes” spirit that’s only supposed to be on TV these days.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is as overstuffed as its title implies, even more juvenile than its pedigree suggests, and so creatively unbound from the minute it starts that it makes Daniels’ previous efforts seem like they were made with Bressonian restraint by comparison (for context, their last feature was a sweet fable starring Harry Potter as an explosively farting corpse). It’s a movie that I saw twice just to make sure I hadn’t completely hallucinated it the first time around, and one that I will soon be seeing a third time for the same reason. I don’t ever expect to understand how it was (or got) made, but I already know that it works. And I know that it works because my impulse to pick on its imperfections and wonder how it might’ve been different eventually forfeits to the utter miracle of its existence.

It’s a movie… about a flustered Chinese-American woman trying to finish her taxes. Evelyn Wang (Yeoh) is being audited — first by the IRS, and then by the other great evils of our multiverse. She and her stubbornly guileless husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, a sublime revelation in one of his first major roles since the days of Short Round) immigrated to California in pursuit of happiness after Evelyn’s overbearing father, Gong Gong (James Hong, 93 years old and yet still in his prime) forbid the marriage, but their dreams of a brighter future were soon quashed by the realities of running a small business and raising a child of their own.

The spectrum of women who Evelyn imagined she might become grew smaller every day, the possibilities burning away like joss paper until the proprietress of a failing laundromat was the only person left in the ashes. Now Evelyn’s life consists of wincing her way through racist micro-aggressions at work and beyond, peeling off the googly eyes that Waymond sticks everywhere to make objects seem happier, and acting as narrow-minded towards her lesbian daughter Joy (an inter-dimensionally great Stephanie Hsu in what should be a star-making performance) as her own father was towards her. Every parent wants what’s best for their children, but even the ones who should know better can delude themselves into thinking they know what that is. The more faith you have in someone’s potential, the harder it can be to recognize how they’re achieving it.

Maybe it would help if Evelyn could see history repeating itself — if she could remember the look that fell across her dad’s face when the doctor told him: “I’m sorry, it’s a girl.” Luckily for Evelyn, the entire space-time continuum will avail itself to her by the end of the Chinese New Year party she’s throwing as part of Gong Gong’s latest visit. And she might not even have to wait that long, as an emergency meeting with demonic IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdra is interrupted by an even more urgent plea for Evelyn to save the entire multiverse from annihilation.

The hows and whys of what happens next are best left for audiences to discover first-hand, but it might help to imagine if “The Matrix” had been directed by people who grew up watching “The Matrix” — more specifically, by people who grew up watching “The Matrix,” spent their twenties pushing the visual boundaries of viral videos in much the same way as the Wachowskis broke new ground for Hollywood blockbusters, and then spent all of the cache they’d accrued on a disorientingly sweet movie about a corpse that farts so hard it can function as a jet ski. That’s what we’re dealing with here.

Evelyn soon finds herself pin-balling between “alternate life paths” in much the same way as Neo was slingshotted between the real world and a simulation. Or are they pin-balling into her? A version of Waymond acts as her Morpheus (few characters have ever been saddled with this much exposition, and even fewer have done as much with it), while bystanders like Deirdre are conscripted into a war between a parallel universe and a dimension-hopping demigod. A crucial difference soon emerges: Evelyn isn’t the One, she’s the Zero. In an infinite sea of possible Evelyns, she is the ultimate sum of unrealized potential and missed opportunities. No other version of herself has settled for less, or found so little joy in the people she loves — her daughter most of all.

Evelyn is an empty vessel, and that makes it uniquely easy for her to contain other iterations of herself. One of them is a Peking opera singer. One of them is a piñata. One of them became a Hong Kong action star after denying Waymond’s marriage proposal, and now yearns for the man who got away in a rainswept alley that’s soaked with “In the Mood for Love” ambiance and shot with flashes of Wong Kar-Wai’s signature step-printing technique (Yeoh channels Maggie Cheung, and Quan makes for a dashing Tony Leung stand-in).

This flourish, fleshed out with footage from Yeoh’s “Crazy Rich Asians” press tour, is par for the course in a movie that invites its most famous cast members to span the entire spectrum of their screen personas, as “Everything Everywhere All at Once” refracts them through the afterimage of their careers with a prismatic dynamism that mirrors the multiverse itself (“Millennium Actress” fans will find this to be one of several different elements that lend Daniels’ film the elastic essence of a live-action anime). Deirdre is a literally multi-dimensional role played by Jamie Lee Curtis — not someone I would’ve expected to star in one of the great fight scenes of the 21st century, but our universe is weird like that. Her character is often tough, sometimes tender, and always greater than the sum of her parts because of how fearlessly Curtis layers them on top of each other.

Of course, it’s Yeoh’s monumental performance that holds the multiverse together, as she skips from slapstick cluelessness to staggering omniscience as fluidly as Evelyn moves between worlds. One moment she’s trying to focus on her taxes, the next she’s looking for love in a universe where a quirk of evolution has, um, changed the laws of intimacy in a very ridiculous way. (As you might recall from the farting corpse movie, Daniels tend to use playground humor as a Trojan horse to more directly interrogate the nature of our existence than polite cinema might allow, and the fight sequence in which Evelyn squares off against two guys who have large trophies jammed up their butts — masterfully choreographed by stunt coordinator Timothy Eulich — is just the tip of the iceberg here.)

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” allows Yeoh to revisit the best kind of roles she’s ever had, shine in the kind of roles she was never given, and dive head-first into the kind of roles that have always seemed beneath her; first one after the other, and then later all at the same time. It’s no surprise that the star of “Supercop 2” still excels at balletic martial arts choreography (watching Quan decimate some rent-a-cops with a fanny pack is another story), just as it’s no secret that the beating heart of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” can play a withering mom so well that even people in the audience might feel like they’re letting her down.

But Yeoh’s performance as the ultimate everywoman is uniquely astonishing because of how well she braids her many talents together. Evelyn is splintered by self-denial to the degree that even her subtitles fracture apart at one point, and yet the actress playing her is so locked-in to the character’s belief that her life is “wrong” that you can feel Evelyn start to reclaim her perspective when things go truly haywire. The entire second chapter of this three-part movie unfolds like an exponentially more complex version of the memory chase from “Being John Malkovich,” and yet Yeoh never allows us to get lost as she careens across the multiverse — through everything, toward nothing, and possibly back towards a new understanding of “how things are supposed to be.”

Speaking of not realizing how good we had it, it’s telling that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” deliberately evokes so many different movies from 1999 (Daniels also tap into the manic thrum of “Magnolia” in order to depict the entropy of Evelyn’s daily life, and exhume the swaggering nihilism of “Fight Club” for the villain’s self-destructive mayhem). The closest sibling to this film in terms of its anything goes, everything goes hard, DIY doomsday cult aesthetic is probably the Sion Sono freak-outs that came a few years later — Joy’s costumes are worth the price of admission unto themselves, especially the Björk-inspired white bagel dress she wears to the end of the world — but there’s no mistaking that Daniels embody a there are no rules!  approach that used to be commonplace in mainstream American cinema and now feels as alien to us as the members of Evelyn’s family do to each other. It’s wild that such a visionary take on the multiverse is getting a wide release while “Spider-Man: No Way Home” is still in theaters; it would be like a top 40 radio station playing “Kid A” and Kid Rock back-to-back one night in the early 2000s just because they both technically qualified as popular music.

The filmmaking here is so bold and without boundaries that it sometimes feels out of place in such a warm hug of a movie. That push-and-pull is endemic to the nature of Daniels’ work, and the more virtuosically multi-dimensional “Everything Everywhere All at Once” becomes, the more unambiguously its vision calcifies into a small handful of comforting truths. Any film that spans from the dawn of life on Earth to the potential death of the universe itself is going to operate in broad terms, and yet Evelyn and her family are such lovably specific people that it can be frustrating when they start talking to each other in platitudes, no matter how beautiful those platitudes often are.

This is a movie animated by the friction it creates from rubbing the entire concept of human existence against one woman’s struggle to focus on some paperwork — among so many other things, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” has to be the truest depiction of ADHD I’ve ever seen — and Daniels can only hope to sustain that tension by constantly escalating the tug-of-war between the epicness of their premise and the intimacy of their characters. They have to double down on every joke and triple-underline every breakthrough just so that Evelyn’s epiphany that “we’re all small and stupid” might actually feel like the biggest thing in the world.

It does. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is about finding something to hold onto in the midst of oblivion, and it isn’t afraid to make itself the ultimate example of how that might work. Guided by an omnipresent Son Lux score that always manages to find a measure of harmony amid the chaos, Daniels spin the tedium of laundry and taxes into an apocalyptic war against the spirit of nihilism itself. And just when it seems like their runaway imaginations are about to lead this film up its own butthole and straight into the void beyond, something reaches out to hold it down and pull it back from the abyss (an image that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” makes literal in heart-burstingly poignant fashion).

In creating a multiverse so wide that even the greatest of miracles are reduced to mere statistical inevitabilities, Daniels have made something truly special: A movie that celebrates the infinite possibilities of its medium by finding a measure of I wouldn’t trade it for the world beauty in every permutation. A movie that reconciles the smallness of our lives with the infinity of their potential. A movie that will forever change the way you think about bluetooth, butt plugs, and Brad Bird — about everything bagels and everything else. This may not be the only universe there is, but it’s the only one we’ve got. But if we’re able to see it clearly, there’s an outside chance it might just be the only one we need.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” premiered at the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. A24 will release it in theaters on Friday, March 25.

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Ambitious, Outrageous Everything Everywhere All at Once Is All That and More

By Maureen Ryan

To say that Everything Everywhere All at Once takes big swings is a profound understatement. This movie’s swings proliferate wildly and take their own swings, which then give birth to thousands more swings, all of which drop acid together and explode in a display of fireworks (which may or may not involve butt plugs).

In the race to make the most meta piece of entertainment of all time, the competition is fierce. (Before the screening of Everything Everywhere I attended, there was a preview of the upcoming movie in which Nicolas Cage plays Nicolas Cage). But thanks to an extraordinary cast and an emotional undertow that proves irresistible, Everything Everywhere ends up being — if you can ride all those big swings — satisfyingly bonkers. Or bonkersly satisfying. I am not sure the latter phrase is grammatically correct, but this movie may have broken my brain.

I have no complaints on that score, because the incandescent Michelle Yeoh , making the most of the roles of a lifetime, did much of the breaking. That choice of the word “roles,” by the way, was not an error: Yeoh plays an astonishing array of versions of one woman, and these filmmakers understood she was the only woman on Earth that could have made this batshit ride actually work.

Although, confession time: Did I love the scenes of her with hotdogs where her fingers should be as much as directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinart clearly did? I did not. But Everything Everywhere is that kind of movie. It’s a lot on top of a lot, and then more is piled on top of that concatenation of concepts. You’re unlikely to vibe with every element of it, but never mind: because before you know it, it’s sprinting on to the next thing. Anyway, the kindest thing to do at this point would be to pause and let you have a moment to process the concept of “hotdog fingers.” If it’s any consolation, they end up being one of the least weird elements of the film. I really want to tell you about the desolate cliff where a [blank] talks to a [blank] – a truly lovely moment in which the film slows down to let you catch your breath – or the scene in which a vengeful woman beats a man with [blanks], but I also don’t want to spoil too much of its exuberant loopiness.

Everything Everywhere is certainly a very 2022 movie, in that its characters are often overwhelmed, confused and rarely sure that linear time exists anymore (and if it does… ehnnnnh ? Does it matter?). That’s not to say that the main character, Evelyn (Yeoh), allows herself the luxury of feeling exhausted. There is too much to do in her personal life and in the struggling laundry she runs with her earnest husband, Waymond ( Ke Huy Quan ). The first half of the film spends a lot of time laying out the strange things that happen to Evelyn and her family, and the rules (“rules”??) of how it all works. Suffice to say that she is, in spite of the humdrum nature of her existence, a crucial Chosen One destined to fight a titanic battle. Out of a vast multiverse of Evelyns — a film star, a chef, a martial arts expert and so on — the overworked Evelyn, the one just trying to plan a party for her dad ( James Hong ), is the One who must defeat an equally powerful foe. Due to the laundry’s tax issues, a good deal of that battle takes place inside a truly cursed IRS office.

A lesser actor would have used this expansive Into the Spiderverse meets Inception meets Airplane! premise to go broad and abandon subtlety. But the directors and Yeoh understand that the audience won’t buy into any of it unless Evelyn — all the Evelyns — are real, textured, intelligent people. The main Evelyn is not always likable and not always able to truly see her husband and her daughter Joy ( Stephanie Hsu ). This is largely because she’s allowed herself to be swallowed up by her responsibilities, which distract her, at least some of the time, from her lack of self-confidence and hope. (And that may be the most impressive trick of Everything Everywhere — that Yeoh could believably play a woman in her flop era).

By Savannah Walsh

By David Canfield

By Chris Murphy

One might wish for some streamlining here or there; some exposition is ungainly, and there are uneven moments that emanate the shaggy, indulgent bravado of ambitious film students fresh off a powerful bong hit. But arriving at some kind of acceptance — making peace with things that can be flawed, overstuffed, yet delicious — is a theme that percolates through Everything Everywhere .

A lot of sad movies underscore the fact that our existences can be mind-meltingly hard, and reality can feel, at times, like a tornado of confusion — one that makes it hard to figure out how to find moments of meaning, grace, truth or love. This movie uses absurdity to explore those ideas, but when it’s on its A-game — and with this cast, it often is — it’s anything but grim. How could it be, when it’s paying homage to classic Hong Kong action cinema and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at the same time?

Yeoh imbues Evelyn with moving shades of melancholy, regret, resolve and growing curiosity. She’s the kind of woman the world (and Hollywood) routinely overlooks, but Yeoh makes her embrace of lead-character energy positively gripping. Quan, a former child star, plays multiple iterations of his own character as well, and he is stunningly effective as quite different versions of Wayland (all of whom possess a similar spark of steadfast integrity). In every reality, he holds his own with Yeoh; if he doesn’t get a ton more work after this, Hollywood has failed us all.

There are deliriously bizarre martial arts battles and hotdog fingers; one page of my notes just says “good raccoon stuff.” Everything Everywhere All at Once is not for everyone, but within ten minutes, you’ll know if it’s for you. I will admit to a weakness for projects that, when you describe them, you sound like you’ve taken leave of your senses — but only if that wild abandon and imaginative momentum is tied to something deeper and richer. Everything Everywhere’s final-act swerve into emotionally charged territory works like gangbusters, thanks to vulnerable, deeply impressive work by Quan, Yeoh and Hsu. (Hong steals almost every scene he’s in, but of course, that’s par for the course for him.)

I can’t sum up this movie — and that’s a feature, not a bug. But I can say that Everything Everywhere is at least partly about not letting the forces of cynicism, isolation and hopelessness win. At the core of this wildly ambitious thrill ride, there are quite accessible ideas about connection, change and love. Those may be cornball (hotdog?) sentiments. But it is not for this lowly mortal to tell Michelle Yeoh she’s wrong.

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Everything everywhere all at once review: yeoh delivers in imaginative sci-fi.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is weird in the best of ways, emotional, smart, and ready to take viewers on a ride they won’t soon forget.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is unlike any movie audiences will see this year. Wildly creative and touching, writer-directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as Daniels) meticulously craft a film that is as imaginative as it is intense. Everything Everywhere All At Once is weird in the best of ways, emotional, smart, and ready to take viewers on a ride they won’t soon forget.

The film follows Evelyn Wang ( Michelle Yeoh ), a middle-aged Chinese American business owner who is struggling with everything. Her laundromat is not doing so well, her marriage to husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is on the rocks, she still feels distant from her previously estranged father (James Hong), and Evelyn’s relationship with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is strained. On top of all that, Evelyn finds herself in the midst of an IRS audit headed by a stern agent named Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis). Evelyn is trying to salvage her crumbling relationships while avoiding her own feelings of inadequacy. Everything changes, however, when Evelyn is made aware of a multiverse — multiple versions of herself who branched off because a different choice was made, each of which took them on different paths — and is told she is crucial to saving it.

Related:  Everything Everywhere All At Once Cast & Character Guide

Everything Everywhere All at Once dwells in a very wondrous, chaotic world, one that is bound by thin rules and occasionally zany nonsense. It makes the film incredibly fun and wholly unpredictable, which is to its benefit. At its center, however, is a very grounded story, bolstered by a moving performance by Michelle Yeoh. She is the beating heart of the film, imbuing Evelyn with anxious tendencies, unbridled energy, and a desperate need to throw everything away and save it all at once. Yeoh conveys the strength, apprehension, and earnestness required to make Evelyn’s emotions feel as deep as they do and her nuanced performance delivers.  Ke Huy Quan is a particular standout here, tasked with playing a very confident version of Waymond, a regretful optimist, and Evelyn’s often exasperated husband. More than anyone in the film, Waymond is the glue that holds it all together and the actor's portrayal is a memorable one. Stephanie Hsu as Joy bares her soul and the emotions she conveys — anger, frustration, love — are raw and heartbreaking.

The film ponders the world and whether anything really matters. Is anything worth fighting for when the chaos of living in a social media-connected world, where everyone is constantly splitting their attention and energy between a constant and devastating news cycle, their own life struggles, and whatever hot button issue is at the forefront? Everything matters and nothing does. Everything Everywhere All at Once sorts through the disarray, allowing Evelyn a chance to understand exactly what the perceived villain Jobu Tupaki (Hsu) feels while simultaneously pushing her to fight for something, anything, even if it all seems hopeless. To that end, the film, even in all of its multiversal action, is endearing and hopeful.

The film handles its primary themes well, but it is most heartwarming when focused on the dynamics of Evelyn’s family. She is tired of her husband and daughter, but she’s also got a lot of her own issues to sort through, issues that stem from Evelyn’s own relationship with her father. Evelyn and her family are very much the heart of the story and their relationship with each other — tense, loving, complicated — is the fuel that keeps the movie going. When things get to a head, it’s up to Evelyn to sort through her own discontentment and The Daniels skillfully push her to do so, culminating in an ending that has just the right amount of emotion to work.

Visually, Everything Everywhere All at Once is spectacular and unhinged, willing to take things to the next level in a bid to explore the multiverse and all it holds. There is so much going on and it’ll take several rewatches to catch everything, but there is something utterly intoxicating and mesmerizing in the way the effects and multiverse-hopping are employed. The Daniels made a film that masterfully utilizes sci-fi and action to tell a thoughtful, heartfelt, and nuanced story about family and the life that is worth fighting for. All told, Everything Everywhere All at Once has something for everyone, and audiences will be pulled in by the film’s fantastically imaginative world and the message at its core.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once is playing in theaters as of April 1. The film is 132 minutes long and is rated R for some violence, sexual material, and language.

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Everything everywhere all at once.

Everything Everywhere All at Once Is a Mind-Bending Multiverse Fantasy

Finally, a movie with infinite Michelle Yeohs

The term multiverse has gone from a buzzword in theoretical physics to a tenet of blockbuster storytelling. If filmmakers want one Spider-Man to shake another one’s hand on-screen, or if studios need to explain how multiple actors can play Batman across different movies, then they can always lean on the notion of parallel universes. In Everything Everywhere All at Once , the multiverse crashes into the mundane, as the film uses comic-book logic to pose a question nearly everyone has asked themselves at some point: What if my life had gone in another direction?

That anxiety hangs in the air around Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh), a Chinese American woman who operates a laundromat with her sweet, if guileless, husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). Her relationship with her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), is frosty, particularly around the subject of the girlfriend Joy wants to bring to a family party; Evelyn’s disapproving father (James Hong) spends many scenes glowering in the background. As her troubled business is being audited by a domineering IRS inspector (Jamie Lee Curtis), Evelyn is dragged into a closet by her husband and informed that she’s the only person who can save the entire multiverse from total annihilation.

How? Well, by tapping into all the infinite Evelyns out there, of course, and doing battle with a mysterious, cross-dimensional warlord. The version of Waymond who recruits her is from another world, one already in the middle of an apocalypse, and he demonstrates his different identity by taking on a gaggle of security guards armed only with a fanny pack. In this genre-defying new film from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (a directorial team known as Daniels), the multiverse is an ocean of possibilities, filled with Evelyns who have collectively done and seen everything imaginable. But that fantasy premise is a double-edged sword: These other Evelyns have surprising skills to lend, but also alluring memories of events that Evelyn herself will never get to experience.

In Everything Everywhere All at Once , Evelyn learns how to shift among realities like tuning the dial on a radio, accessing abilities such as kung-fu mastery, opera singing, and extreme dexterity with her toes, every time catching glimpses of other lives. What would’ve happened had she not chosen to marry Waymond or move to the United States, or if she lived in a world where everyone had hot dogs dangling off their hands instead of fingers? Daniels stuffs the frame with flashes of memory, paying homage to different genres and mimicking specific film aesthetics; the directors hop from stop-motion animation to wuxia to a breathtaking re-creation of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love .

The experience is overwhelming, familiar territory for Daniels, whose debut feature film, Swiss Army Man , was a charming but outrageous tale of a man bonding with a talking, farting corpse while stranded on a desert island. The premise of Everything Everywhere All at Once demands a kitchen-sink approach, but at moments during its 139-minute running time, I was begging for a break from the dense world-building monologues and montages. The writer-directors’ expansive sci-fi thinking is absolutely joyous, although the boundless scope also means the movie could just go on explaining forever, and at certain points in the slightly soggy middle, I worried it might.

Read: Pop culture is having a metaphysical moment

What keeps Everything Everywhere All at Once from falling into a black hole of sprawling thought is its wonderful central performances, and the emotional through line that Yeoh and Quan follow amid all the chaos. The film’s fantasy conceit lines up with the melancholic question at the core of Evelyn and Waymond’s relationship—would they have been better off apart? As the movie cycles through different realities, it keeps presenting ways that their bond makes some ineffable sense. This film is not a grandiose tale of love transcending all, but it does find all kinds of sweet, specific ways to portray a lasting partnership.

Yeoh initially presents Evelyn as dismissive and worn down, but as the film goes on she starts revealing her vulnerabilities, her fear of disappointment, and her aversion to commitment of any kind. Though her character is distinctive and well-drawn, her preoccupation with roads not taken is a universal one, beautifully externalized by the multiversal war she gets pulled into. Quan, who has had few major roles in film since his stardom as a young actor, gives a rich and grounded performance as someone far less troubled by his past choices, a gentle partner who’s also not as naive as he initially lets on.

The other major narrative thread of Everything Everywhere All at Once is Evelyn’s bond with her daughter, Joy, who is facing a future of immeasurable possibility, and (like so many young people) feels stuck trying to make even one choice, burdened both by family expectation and existential anxieties. I won’t spoil the masterful direction Daniels takes this relationship in and will just say that here is where the film displays its underlying maturity, amid all the hot-dog fingers and talking rocks. The multiverse is an exciting notion, and a narratively thrilling one. But it’s also a useful way of illustrating the quotidian dissatisfactions of life—feelings that anyone can relate to but that we can choose not to drown in.

Related Podcast

Listen to David Sims discuss Everything Everywhere All at Once on an episode of The Atlantic ’s culture podcast The Review :

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Everything Everywhere All at Once review – nothing nowhere over a long period of time

Despite some smart gags, this broadly buzzed-about comedy turns out to be an oddly mediocre misfire

T his hipster hypefest is an adventure in alternative existences and multiverse realities from writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – the “Daniels” – who in 2016 gave us the Jonzeian comedy Swiss Army Man . Everything Everywhere All at Once has been critically swooned over in the US and pretty much everywhere else, so it’s disconcerting to find it frantically hyperactive and self-admiring and yet strangely laborious, dull and overdetermined, never letting up for a single second to let us care about, or indeed believe in, any of its characters.

Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn, a Chinese-American woman who co-owns a scuzzy laundromat with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan); Evelyn is discontented with her life and has a tense relationship with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), using Joy’s frail and old-fashioned grandfather Gong Gong (James Hong) – who lives with them – as an excuse not to accept Joy’s gay identity. Evelyn reaches a crisis when confronted by an angry tax officer, Deirdre Beaubeirdra ( Jamie Lee Curtis ), who is auditing their business, and furious about Evelyn’s attempts to claim deductions for a karaoke machine for the laundromat’s community party nights, at which Evelyn also offers food. In her heart, poor Evelyn figures she could have been a singer, or a chef, or a movie star in another life and this tax-deduction issue triggers a crazy journey into any number of different universes for more than two hours.

There are some nice gags and sprightly Kubrickian touches, and one genuinely shocking scene when Evelyn fat-shames her daughter – an authentically upsetting moment of family dysfunction that seems to come from another film, one in a parallel universe. But this mad succession of consequence-free events, trains of activity which get cancelled by a switch to another parallel world, means that nothing is actually at stake, and the film becomes a formless splurge of Nothing Nowhere Over a Long Period of Time. Again, this film is much admired and arrives adorned with saucer-eyed critical notices … I wish I liked it more.

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“Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Reviewed: There’s No There There

By Richard Brody

The movie world is awash in fantasy, and that’s a problem, because fantasy is the riskiest genre. There’s no middle ground with fantasy because there’s no ground at all. Even a middling work of realism inevitably rests on experience, observation, and knowledge, but a mediocre fantasy is a transparent emptiness, a contrivance of parts that aren’t held together by the atmosphere of social life. It’s the triple axel of cinema: when successful, fantasies are glorious, seemingly expanding the very nature of experience by way of speculative imagination. Some of the best movies of recent years—“ The Future ,” “ Us ,” and “ The French Dispatch ”—are fantasies, and their artistic success is doubled by their very resistance to the corporatization of fantasy in the overproduction and overmanagement of superhero franchises. But a failed fantasy is a wipeout, and that’s the simplest and clearest way to describe “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a new film (opening Friday) by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (a duo called Daniels ). Were it not for the appealing and charismatic presence of its cast, it would leave nothing but a vapor puff that disperses when the lights go on.

The emptiness of “E.E.A.A.O.” is all the more disheartening inasmuch as its fantasy has a substantial and significant real-world premise, one that gets a flip and generic treatment for the sake of some neat-o special effects. “E.E.A.A.O.” is the story of a married couple, Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) and Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan), who were born and raised in China and came to the United States as adults. They own a laundromat in the Simi Valley, in California, and have trouble, business and personal. The laundromat is losing money and Evelyn and Waymond are growing distant from each other; she is demanding and peremptory, and he is mild-mannered and whimsical. Her father (James Hong), called only Gong Gong (“maternal grandfather”), is visiting from China, and the couple try to maintain a cheerful front to convince him that they’ve made a success of life in America. Their daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), is a recent college graduate at loose ends; when her mother introduces Joy’s girlfriend, Becky (Tallie Medel), to Gong Gong as her “good friend”—i.e., she hides from him that Joy is queer—this failure instantly rips the mother-daughter relationship apart.

The Wangs’ biggest and most pressing problem is taxes: they’re being audited by the I.R.S. At their appointment, the auditor, Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis), is stern and aggressive; she threatens to seize the Wangs’ business and personal assets, giving them until six that evening to reorganize and refile their claims. But Waymond has already given Evelyn a way out: in the elevator, he transforms into someone like himself, who’s not exactly himself, and gives Evelyn a set of instructions—on the back of a divorce filing, no less—that will enable her to enter the so-called multiverse, the realm of alternate lives that she could have lived.

What’s in a name? Sometimes, all one needs to know. The auditor’s full name is Deirdre Beaubeirdra (yes, she was named according to “The Name Game”), which exemplifies the arbitrary and sophomoric whimsy that runs through the film and governs its plot and tone. The portal to the multiverse is a janitor’s closet down the hall from Deirdre’s desk. The multiverse launch involves switching shoes to the wrong feet, special scans, special earbuds, whirlwind video effects, a murder in the closet, a punch in Deirdre’s nose, a call for security, and a fight with security in which Waymond uses his fanny pack as a lethal weapon. Despite the chaos, the multiverse very quickly emphasizes one road not taken: Evelyn, instead of leaving China with that “silly boy” (as her father calls Waymond), stays home and becomes a movie star in martial-arts films. And why not; there’s poignancy and irony built into the idea. If only Kwan and Scheinert had stuck with it and developed it. Instead, Evelyn’s alt-career merely crops up intermittently amid a plethora of other transformations—a surfeit of caprices that attempt to conceal the movie’s hollowness.

Long aggrieved and newly offended, Joy becomes Evelyn’s superhero nemesis, Jobu Tupaki, a character of many costumes who has one constant. It’s as embarrassing to say it as it is to watch onscreen: she says that she “put everything on a bagel,” and she means not the flavor but the universe itself—therefore “the bagel becomes the truth,” and the truth is that “nothing matters.” (Yes, she both wears a symbolic bagel on her head and emblazons a giant rotating one at the altar of her lair.) There’s an alternate universe in which Evelyn and Deirdre are lovers, with fingers as hot dogs squirting mustard and ketchup; one in which no life existed and Evelyn is a rock on a cliff; one in which Evelyn turns into a piñata dangling from a tree; another in which security guards get their kung-fu power from trophies stuck in their asses. And the realms interact, so Evelyn fights in the I.R.S. office with these alternate tools, whether martial arts or an egg that she’d once flung as a Benihana-style chef.

Yet, through it all, the dual stories—the couple fights to save their business and their home, and the same couple realizes different lives in China—remain basic; instead of unfolding over two-plus hours, they merely lurch ahead in plot-point-y snippets. It’s here that the definition of imagination as an artistic quality emerges—negatively. Kwan and Scheinert don’t envision in detail the daily lives of a small-business owner in California or of a celebrity in China. The stories suggest an ample array of poignant and nuanced possibilities, which go unrealized. They’d be all the stronger with a sense of subjectivity, and of alternate worlds as they leak consciousnesses into one another—not just how a laundromat owner imagines life as a martial-arts star, but also vice versa, and whether and why that might even seem preferable. (Spoiler alert: when it does happen, it only delivers a deflating, generic dash of sentimental bathos. There’s no place like home.)

Kwan and Scheinert show little interest in the experiences of their characters. Evelyn is written as a vague outline whose substance is provided by the presence, the performance, and the identity of Michelle Yeoh. The other characters offer their actors even less to work with. The C.G.I. conjures rapid-fire flashes of alternate lives, but not the pathos of feeling one of them slip away. Instead of personality, the characters have problems to solve; instead of traits, they have single-factor backstories; instead of subjectivity, they spew psychobabble and aphorisms borrowed from a superhero’s whiteboard quest. For all the gyrating action, the movie lacks physicality; the characters don’t seem to be in one another’s presence, their feet don’t touch the ground. The template for “E.E.A.A.O.” isn’t the observation of life from the amplified perspective of imagination; it’s the factitious world of superheroes, adorned with the action of martial-arts movies and the dazzle of effects and gaudy costumes, filled with undergraduate late-night epiphanies and sophomoric humor.

When Waymond expounds the rules of the multiverse to Evelyn, there might as well be a flashing sign reading “Exposition” over the screen, because there’s an absolute absence of awareness that two characters are having a meaningful conversation. It’s exactly such scenes that provide a litmus test of imagination and prove its power to illuminate reality—creating a form to give experience an original and singular identity. Instead, Kwan and Scheinert deprive their characters of identity; the protagonists are universalized, stripped of history and culture, lacking any personal connection to the wider world. With its bland and faux-universal life lessons that cheaply ethicalize expensive sensationalism, the film comes off as a sickly cynical feature-length directorial pitch reel for a Marvel movie.

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‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’: Martial arts and metaphysics

Michelle yeoh stars in the daniels’ exhilarating, exhausting follow-up to ‘swiss army man'.

Collaborative filmmakers Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as the Daniels, have never been accused of resting on their laurels. They made a splash with their 2014 music video for the song “ Turn Down for What ,” in which Kwan played a character at the mercy of his highly visible state of arousal. Their 2016 feature debut, “ Swiss Army Man ,” starred Daniel Radcliffe as the titular flatulent corpse, whose body is used as a sort of all-purpose multitool/friend/therapist by a suicidal castaway (Paul Dano), who in the process discovers a reason to live.

Meet the Daniels. Their new movie is about a farting corpse.

And their new, sci-fi-inflected meditation on the meaning of life, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn, a humble laundromat operator who discovers the multiverse, in which there are uncountable alternate versions of her with amazing skills that Evelyn must learn to tap into to defeat a malevolent being with the Star Wars-ian name of Jobu Tupaki.

Early in the film, Jobu is identified as an “agent of chaos” by a version of Evelyn’s husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, whom some may remember as Short Round from “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”). This version of Evelyn’s spouse, who calls himself Alpha Waymond, has managed to figure out how to “verse-jump” from one reality to another, and he has come to warn Evelyn that, in each of the parallel worlds, Jobu has manifested himself — herself? itself? — in the body of Evelyn and Waymond’s slacker daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu).

Jobu’s instrument of destruction — or Death Star, so to speak — is represented as an everything bagel. (A bagel, it should be noted, is tennis slang for a score of zero, not coincidentally. So the central metaphor of the film is one of cosmic, zenlike opposites: all existence and all nothingness, wrapped up together in wax paper, with a schmear.)

Let it be said that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is irrefutable evidence that the Daniels have imagination and originality to burn. I guarantee you haven’t seen anything quite like it before. What this movie could use a little more of is the rigor and self-discipline to pull off all the imagination and originality in a way that does more than leave you gobsmacked.

By one measure, “Everything” is an exhilarating roller coaster ride of sci-fi gobbledygook. On another, it’s an intergenerational mother-daughter family drama masquerading as a philosophical dissertation on the nature of existence — with martial arts action. All of this is delivered with a pell-mell brio and a lo-fi special effects aesthetic reminiscent of Michel Gondry, funneled through a fire hose that blasts everything at you so fast that you might not notice how silly and sophomoric it all is.

The mechanism for verse-jumping? It involves identifying the most statistically unlikely decision you can make at any given moment, then doing it: putting your shoes on the wrong feet, for instance; eating an entire stick of lip balm; deliberately giving yourself paper cuts.

And the ultimate message of the film — or, rather, messages, as there seem to be several, delivered like desserts on a sampler platter, over the course of the film’s seemingly interminable third act — are, in no particular order: Nothing matters; be kind; we’re all small and stupid; love each other; and it’s all just a pointless, swirling bucket of baloney (“baloney” being a euphemism for what you might step in on a cattle ranch).

Some may find that last lesson emblematic of the film itself. Others will be dazzled by Yeoh’s acting (it’s amazing) or the deadpan comedic performance of Jamie Lee Curtis as a humorless IRS auditor named Deirdre Beaubeirdra. (Apparently, Banana-Fana-Feaufeirdra wouldn’t fit on her nameplate.) Deirdre, who appears in multiple forms, is, in one of the multiverses — one in which everyone has hot dogs for fingers — Evelyn’s lover. In another, she’s her nemesis.

It’s hard to know what to make of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It’s a tour de force — but of what? It’s exhausting. It’s funny. It’s confusing. It’s way too long and feels like it has multiple endings. One scene features a silent conversation in subtitles, between two boulders with googly eyes glued on them. Googly eyes are a central leitmotif of the film, for unknown reasons.

Forget “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” This movie gives new meaning to the words “strange” and “madness.” It’s the cinematic equivalent of an everything bagel: a substrate of bupkis, dressed up with whatever you can throw on it.

R. At area theaters. Contains violence, sexual humor and coarse language. 140 minutes.

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All at once, common sense media reviewers.

Dramedy has lots of swearing and risky teen behavior.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Everyone makes mistakes, but instead of beating yo

James sacrifices his own dreams to raise his best

One of the World Trade Center towers is shown on T

A man walks in to find two teens in bed; a bare le

"F--k" and variations, "bitch," "s--t," "a--hole,"

A few action movies, especially starring Sylvester

Lots of adult drinking socially. A few times are t

Parents need to know that All at Once is a dramedy about a man who raises his best friend's two daughters after the friend dies in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. A burning and collapsing tower is briefly shown, and at the end is a dedication to all who lost their lives due to those events…

Positive Messages

Everyone makes mistakes, but instead of beating yourself up about it when you do, learn to make better choices and try not to make the same mistake again. Resentment only hurts yourself, so don't hold on to it. Although it's often difficult, change is good; just be patient and allow some time to adjust.

Positive Role Models

James sacrifices his own dreams to raise his best friend's two daughters after the friend dies. He definitely makes mistakes, usually by saying things he doesn't really mean, but he loves the girls, would do anything for them. Alexis models all the downsides of teen years: bad attitude, sneaking out at night, drinking, taking a pill at a party without knowing what it is, running away. Grace is a good model of a tween who's well behaved and loves piano but has other interests too. Bridget is patient and supportive but sticks up for herself when she needs to. James' family and friends are loyal, patient, supportive.

Violence & Scariness

One of the World Trade Center towers is shown on TV as it starts to collapse. Sisters slap each other in the arm a few times. James throws a coffee cup in anger. Joking reference played for comedy about beating children, being kidnapped at gunpoint, and miming shooting someone in the back several times with what looks like an ear of corn.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A man walks in to find two teens in bed; a bare leg, male torso, and female in bra are briefly shown. Arms and legs caressing are revealed to be two men in bed, covered from the waist down and bare from the waist up. A teen boy and girl in a bedroom; the boy puts on pants, the girl stays in bed with a bra on. Some kissing between adults cuts to the couple waking up in bed together in the morning. Nudity is implied but no sensitive parts are shown. Teens kiss and make out a few times at parties.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"F--k" and variations, "bitch," "s--t," "a--hole," "hell," middle-finger gesture, "balls," "bulls--t," "motherf----r," "Jesus Christ" as an exclamation, and "goddamn." Some verbal hostility and name-calling like "stupid."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

A few action movies, especially starring Sylvester Stallone, mentioned. Chevy logo on a car prominently but briefly shown. iPad mentioned.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Lots of adult drinking socially. A few times are to excess, hangovers are implied. Several scenes in bars. Teens at parties with beer bottles, red Solo cups. Smoking; cigarettes, joints, and a cigar. At a party, a teen accepts a pill, shrugs, and takes it, implying she doesn't know what it is. Her hallucinations are briefly shown, and there are consequences when her little sister is injured, she has a heated argument, and gets grounded. Some speculation about snorting cocaine. Mention that a teen's room reeks of cigarettes.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that All at Once is a dramedy about a man who raises his best friend's two daughters after the friend dies in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. A burning and collapsing tower is briefly shown, and at the end is a dedication to all who lost their lives due to those events. There's a lot of strong language, including "f--k," "s--t," and "a--hole." Adults are frequently seen drinking, once or twice to excess. Risky teen behavior includes drinking, smoking tobacco and marijuana, taking an unknown pill, and running away. Sex is implied several times by two people being in bed together unclothed from the waist up, but no sensitive body parts are shown. Kissing and caressing are shown a few times. Mild violence includes sisters slapping each other's arms, and resulting trauma and grief after the events of September 11, 2001. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (2)

Based on 2 parent reviews

Big disappointment

What's the story.

ALL AT ONCE, James Maxwell (Jon Abrahams) goes from being an up-and-coming New York City artist to being a dad to his best friend's two young daughters after the friend dies at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Now, over 10 years later, oldest daughter Alexis (Sasha Frolova) is in full-tilt, teen-rebellion mode while the younger Grace (Nicole Elizabeth Berger) is becoming an accomplished pianist. When James loses his teaching job, he and the girls have to move back to James' hometown of Buffalo, New York. Can the girls get over their resentment of leaving Manhattan? Can James find a way to enjoy life in the town he once couldn't wait to leave behind? And can the three of them find a way to move forward as a family?

Is It Any Good?

Jon Abrahams assembled a charismatic and attractive cast into this dramedy that gives us some mild laughs but never quite finds its real heart. The storytelling takes some odd shortcuts and lingers a bit too long on areas that don't support a strong, unifying theme. But there's enough to enjoy along the way, and All at Once ends on enough of an upbeat note to make it an OK choice for a movie night with older teens and up.

Teens will definitely relate to Alexis' rebelliousness and how annoying she finds both James and Grace. Fortunately they'll also see the negative consequences of her worst behavior, and all ages can certainly empathize with how the loss of her parents continues to affect her.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the strong language in All at Once . Is it realistic? Is it a big deal? Why or why not?

Is the depiction of drinking and drug use realistic or problematic in any way? What negative consequences are shown? Are they accurate or realistic?

Do your parents or relatives remember the attack on the World Trade Center? What do you know about it? How did it affect you, your family, friends, and community?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 9, 2016
• On DVD or streaming : April 3, 2018
• Cast : Jon Abrahams , Mickey Sumner , Annie Potts
• Director : Jon Abrahams
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Virtuoso Films
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Brothers and Sisters
• Run time : 112 minutes
• MPAA rating : NR
• Last updated : November 19, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

Instructions Not Included

Drama Movies That Tug at the Heartstrings

Drama tv for teens, related topics.

• Brothers and Sisters

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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

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Netflixers Episode 4 "Everything Everywhere All At Once"

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Is Woody Allen’s ‘Coup de Chance’ Streaming on Netflix or HBO Max?

W oody Allen‘s 50th directorial release Coup de Chance first premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September of 2023 (to mostly positive reviews) but had struggled to find a U.S. distributor until recently. In the interim, cinephiles everywhere had to dig deep to watch the film.

That all changed once MPI Media Group secured the rights to release it in North American markets. Now, we have you covered on all the ways you can watch it!

The all-French film — which stars Lou de Laâge and Niels Schneider — follows a self-aware trophy wife who reconnects with an old friend from the Lycée Français in New York. With a plot similar to that of 2005’s Match Point , the movie centers around the topic of extra-marital affairs.

So, where can you watch Coup de Chance ? Will it be on Netflix ? What about Max ?

Here’s everything we know about the upcoming movie:

As of now, the only way to watch Coup de Chance is to head out to a movie theater when it releases on Friday, April 5. You can find a local showing on Fandango . Otherwise, you’ll just have to wait until it becomes available to rent or purchase on digital platforms like Vudu , Apple , YouTube , and Amazon on April 12, or available to stream. Keep reading for more information.

Although we know that Coup de Chance is being distributed by MPI Media Group, it has not yet been revealed whether or not it will eventually be available to subscribers of one of the major streaming platforms such as Hulu .

While a streaming release date has not yet been announced, we can guess that if it does end up on streaming, it will be about 45 days after debuting in theaters. If Coup de Chance follows that trajectory, you might be able to watch it from the comfort of your home by mid-May 2024.

No, Coup de Chance will not be on Max since it’s not a Warner Bros. movie. The platform — previously known as HBO Max — also no longer does direct-to-streaming releases. Instead, they’ve implemented a 45-day window between the theatrical release and the Max release.

No, Coup de Chance will not be on Netflix — at least not any time soon. While it’s possible the film may come to the streamer at some point in the future, you’ll just have to head out to a movie theater or wait for it to become available on streaming.

‘Fallout’ Series Gets New Release Date on Prime Video

By Michaela Zee

Michaela Zee

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“ Fallout ” is stepping out of the vault earlier than originally planned.

Prime Video has announced that “Fallout,” adapted from the retro-futuristic video game franchise of the same name, will premiere all eight episodes on April 10 at 6 p.m. PT. The special release includes a live global fan premiere of the first episode, where viewers worldwide can choose their faction and interact with other fans via a live chat function.

Popular on Variety

This is the second update Prime Video has made to the series’ release strategy: “Fallout” was set to drop all eight episodes on April 11, one day earlier than its original April 12 premiere.

MacLachlan, who plays Vault 33 overseer Hank McLean, told Variety of the “Fallout” series adaptation, “The people that play the video games that are real fans are both excited and somewhat hesitant, I think, because they’ve been burned before. But as we’ve been progressively getting into more press about it, as more of the teasers have come out, I find that the tone is shifting from one of ‘Oh, I hope I don’t mess it up’ to one of ‘Oh, I’m so excited. I think this looks pretty great.’”

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Fallout Review: Lucy N’ This Guy, With Dyin’ Man

By Luke Y. Thompson

For all the pointed critique of end-stage capitalism in Fallout – both the new Prime Video series and the video game franchise it’s based on – it sure is a merchandise mover in and of itself. Within the show itself, plastic bobbleheads of smiling mascot Vault Boy survive the nuclear apocalypse; in our reality, they probably will as well. The notion at the heart of the property is that big business will not only market the end of the world but prevail enough, cockroach-like, to continue to turn survival into a franchise via branded Vaults. All decked out in a blue and gold color scheme, suspiciously similar to Walmart’s…and Amazon’s.

Yes, the actual corporate entity with the smile logo, the one that all but monopolizes mail-order and confines employees to massive warehouses full of products, brings you this show critical of massive corporate vaults filled with everything a person needs, where humans are trapped for a near-eternity surrounded by smiling mascot images. What’s that apocryphal Lenin quote about capitalists selling you the rope to hang them with? In actuality, it’s vice versa – idealists will create more consumers by commodifying their critique.

It’s All About Control

Not that communism, by any other name, fares any better in the world of Fallout, which overtly blames anyone who wants to design a top-down, centrally-controlled society for the destruction of said society. That, at least, appears to be the TV show’s understanding of the game’s tag line, “War never changes,” a simple enough phrase that it can mean anything and nothing, and looks good on a T-shirt.

The embodiment of good in Fallout, rather, is Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell, just the right amount of peppy), a Vault-dweller in search of her dad ( Kyle MacLachlan ). Raised in a safe Vault, she constantly cites and lives the golden rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Jesus may not be mentioned by name, but Lucy represents Christianity’s most essential doctrines in word and deed, though the show strongly suggests that a person can only be so naive as to do so if they come from privilege. The dramatic tension comes less from whether or not Lucy will die or get hurt, though that’s there, but whether she’ll have to compromise her principles once she’s removed from her safe, cultish community of like-minded folks and thrown into Mad Max territory up above.

Boils and Ghouls

Lucy’s counterpart, her Satan in the wilderness of sorts, is the Ghoul ( Walton Goggins ). Formerly a pre-war cowboy movie star named Cooper Howard who outright refused to play anything less than a true-blue good guy on screen, he ultimately made many small compromises that paved his way to this Hell. He has since wandered the post-nukescape for over 200 years, looking like the Red Skull as Clint Eastwood, with a conspicuously digitally erased nose. He’s not the only Ghoul out there, but most of them deteriorate into full zombies after a while. Only one with his mad gunslinger skills can consistently obtain enough of the inhaler medication he needs to keep the condition at bay.

There’s a third lead caught somewhere in the moral middle, with the absurdly portentous name of Maximus (Aaron Moten). He’s part of a military-ish operation called the Brotherhood, which somehow has its hands on massive, fully operational airships, helicopters, and the game’s trademark mech suits. Saved by the group as a child from a literal “nuke the fridge” moment, Maximus feels like he owes them everything, but as a newcomer, he still gets treated like crap, especially when pressed into service as a Squire. Essentially, he’s the caddy for a mech-armored Knight, carrying an oversized duffle bag and performing all the menial and life-threatening tasks. If he sounds a bit like a potential Finn to Lucy’s noble Rey, that’s because he is, except this time in the hands of creators who are fine with depicting interracial romance.

About them: considering that Fallout is the work of Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy , you could be forgiven for fearing an overly confusing, twisty narrative. Indeed, the first episode presents the storylines of Lucy, Maximus, and Cooper as if they were entirely unrelated movies spliced together, with completely different styles in different worlds. That doesn’t last long – the three encounter one another relatively soon thereafter, and though the narrative remains divided between different characters in different places, it’s rarely unclear, even when it goes into flashback.

More Shock, Less Awe

In the days of Tales From the Crypt and Dream On, HBO cultivated the “We’re premium cable! Let us shock you!” vibe, which is still there to a point, but their hard-R prestige shows these days – think The Last of Us and House of the Dragon – take their material and atmosphere uber-seriously. Prime Video is clearly looking to recapture some of that old shock spirit, following in the footsteps of The Boys; Nolan and Joy understand the tonal difference and the assignment. Fallout may ultimately have a Christian sort of morality at its heart, but few conservative Christians will ever know, thanks to a somewhat gratuitous parade of jokes about incest, penis-wiping, bestiality, “ass-jerky,” and tossing puppies in furnaces.

Most of these bits feel about as necessary to the script as a 12-year-old yelling f-words to make themselves seem grown-up, but in the right context can be genuinely funny. Like when one character revealing his backstory notes: “I grew up on a fly farm. I was a shitter!” If you’re gonna do toilet humor, let it propel the story forward.

In case it isn’t already abundantly clear, don’t go into Fallout looking for a realistic depiction of a nuked world. It’s primarily satirical and acutely aware of every major apocalypse movie that has come before, loaded with cinematic references that are subtle enough not to browbeat audiences. It’s also not a direct adaptation of any one game in particular. The malfunctioning water chip that’s key to the first game comes up once and is never mentioned again, while the overall plot is most similar to the third game. Like the Resident Evil movies, it’s ostensibly in the world and canon of the games but following completely new characters.

Adapt or Die?

Gamers will have a leg up on twists like the true nature of the Vaults, but attempts to swerve the plot in live-action video game adaptations are overrated. The most popular movie and TV versions of games are usually the ones that stick closest to the original story (The Last of Us, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Mortal Kombat), twists or no. Fallout splits the difference, with familiar terrain and tropes but different leads.

One thing it does not do is skimp. Whatever the (massive) budget was on this thing, it’s all onscreen. The plot may contrive for us to rarely get more than one of the mech suits on camera at a time, but the sets mostly look practical and huge. Back in 1994, the filmmakers behind Double Dragon hoped to give us Planet of the Apes/Statue of Liberty vibes by showcasing an underwater Hollywood and Vine, and, well, they didn’t. Fallout similarly fails to evoke much emotion with the same (kayfabe) location in a similar condition, but at least it includes a giant mutant axolotl that has human fingers protruding from the roof of its mouth.

This is a show that can do that kind of thing one moment, layer in biblical imagery the next (Lucy is effectively both John the Baptist and Salome in one episode), and conclude with a savage (literally and figuratively) assessment of societal tribalism.

Fallout is set in a modern version of a 1960s post-apocalypse vision – think Ib Melchior’s The Time Travelers or Beneath the Planet of the Apes. In this fictional-ish America, the aesthetic of the ’50s never changed right up until nukes went off in 2077. (Interestingly, and usefully for the current audience, while it seems that institutional racism/sexism/queerphobia disappeared, McCarthy-esque Red-baiting remained.) It’s not really the ’50s being critiqued, however, though some will miss the message amidst near-constant carnage.

You probably didn’t expect to hear something like The Zone of Interest invoked, but it comes to mind anyway watching Fallout. Both depict the desire to get along and live comfortably while tuning out the horrors just over the next wall, and both ultimately lead the audience to conclude that isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, possible. Unlike its in-universe Vault-Tec aesthetic, the show isn’t square enough to suggest that being good and doing the right thing saves the day every time. But it does bravely suggest that it’s a reward unto itself and might occasionally change hearts, even when it’s very, very, very hard. It takes a few episodes before the themes start to come into focus, but they all drop at once, so have at ’em.

So, Is It the Bomb?

Fallout is an appropriately named show for many reasons, not the least of which is its effect upon the viewer. It’s a take-no-prisoners explosion right out the gate, but the real effectiveness only sets in once it’s had a chance to linger. The apocalypse in a fresh new coat of paint is the sizzle; the social satire, compromised as it may be, is the ass-jerky that nourishes your attention thereafter.

Fallout debuts on Prime Video on April 10 at 6 p.m. PT.

Luke Y. Thompson has been a professional film critic since 1999, and part of the toy blogging community since the aughts. He was the first blogger to cover Comic-Con panel by panel for a major trade publication, and has several LA Press Club awards and honorable mentions, including one for reviewing fast food.

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‘station 19’ 100th episode recap & showrunners q&a: space needle disaster interrupts andy’s pinning ceremony as tensions skyrocket, kristen wiig’s aunt linda returns to ‘snl’ for first time in 14 years.

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Aunt Linda returned for some new movie reviews.

Kristen Wiig ’s angry, middle-aged film critic was back on SNL ’s Weekend Update to give her hot take on Barbie and Oppenheimer .

Wiig has appeared as Aunt Linda three times before tonight including twice in 2006 and once in 2010, while she was a cast member of the venerable NBC show.

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In regards to Best Picture winner Oppenheimer , she called it “Nopenheimer”, directed by “Christopher Nothanks”. “Why would anyone make a movie about the person who invented the microwave,” she added.

Aunt Linda has also started watching television, “like everyone else”. She said The Bear had a “very misleading title”. “I thought it was going to be about bears living in the woods or at the very least a sitcom a very hairy gay man looking after his sister’s kids,” she said.

Watch the video above.

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