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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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Everything Everywhere All at Once movie poster

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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Movie Reviews

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 Reviews

A great, fabulous, huge movie that is almost literally all heart.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2024

Everything Everywhere All at Once is beautifully chaotic, wonderfully weird, and one of the coolest movies ever made.

Full Review | Sep 27, 2023

The Daniels accomplished something wonderful for the audience.

Full Review | Sep 26, 2023

Michelle Yeoh finally gets a role this decade that pays tribute to her rare talents, and absolutely owns it...

Full Review | Sep 12, 2023

The genre mashup provides a fuller insight into the characters’ personalities than a straight independent film could depict. The multiverse is a metaphor for the different facets of peoples’ potential and makes their internal lives literal.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 16, 2023

Everything Everywhere All at Once will remind you of why you love cinema. It is fresh, creative, and will leave you laughing and shedding some tears.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 27, 2023

An omnipotent being is threatening the multiverse. Who ya gonna call? Spiderman? Dr. Strange? How about a middle-aged Asian-American woman failing as a wife and mother?

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the greatest films of all time. Entertaining, hilarious, emotional, wild, unique, action packed, & INSANE

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

At the heart of it all, we ride a roller coaster of emotions that are inventive, complex, stimulating, and raw.

With such a low budget, it's almost humiliating that so many expensive Hollywood blockbusters can't even reach the heels of so much originality, imagination, excitement, and emotion.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 25, 2023

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a spectacle in the purest sense of the word. A sensory overload, especially in IMAX, the movie is a science fiction, multi-verse spanning love letter to family.

Delightfully disorienting and intellectually absorbing.

Full Review | May 26, 2023

"Everything Everywhere All At Once" is a steaming example of visual, sonic, and thematic noise. Chinese propaganda for propaganda's sake. Vomiting all of the time now. Hollywood pawns.

Full Review | Original Score: ZERO STARS | May 11, 2023

At a few minutes short of two and a half hours, Everything Everywhere All at Once nearly wears out its welcome, but as far as hot dog-fingered audacity goes, the Daniels will make plenty of new eyeballs go googly.

Full Review | May 9, 2023

... Touches upon important themes such as control through technology, media, food, and body while resorting to an anarchic and hilarious sense of humor. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Mar 28, 2023

The filmmakers try to load the entire weight of life, the universe, and everything onto their movie. This is too many things on a bagel.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2023

Michelle Yeoh proves that being a middle aged immigrant has no boundaries and she is backed up with the amazingly gifted talents of Ke Huy Quan, Jaime Lee Curtis and Stephanie Hsu ! The Daniels provide a supreme sci-fi smorgasbord for the ages.

Full Review | Mar 22, 2023

It holds within it a great idea, when one disentangles it from the hairball that is the EEAAO narrative. But [...] in all its originality, it telegraphs its message, instead of allowing this intricately constructed ingenious world to be the message.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 19, 2023

The humor, though, is silly and second-rate. The googly eyes, the talking raccoon, the pet rocks at sunset, the parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey—all those work against the cast instead of with it.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

Much like a hallucinogen might cause you to cycle through every human emotion and see your life laid out end to end — theoretically — this film has an ability to dazzle built into every kinetic, colorful, madcap frame.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Mar 16, 2023

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Everything Everywhere All at Once Perfects Optimistic Nihilism

Ke Huy Quan Jamie Lee Curtis Michelle Yeoh in production still from Everything Everywhere All At Once Curtis stands...

In 2012, the legendary Twitter account @horse_ebooks tweeted, “ Everything happens so much. " Despite bordering on nonsense, the message singularly captured the feeling of exhaustion that comes with trying to keep up with the flood of inputs that demand attention every day. It is in this place of chaotic resignation that Everything Everywhere All at Once steps in to offer clarity.

Everything Everywhere , the latest from the directing duo known as Daniels ( Swiss Army Man ), centers on Evelyn (played in dozens of incarnations by Michelle Yeoh), a woman who's just trying to file her taxes to keep the laundromat she owns with her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), running. Her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), wants to bring her girlfriend to the birthday party for Evelyn's elderly father (James Hong), who's old-fashioned and won't approve of their relationship. All the while, Waymond is struggling to find the space to tell Evelyn that he wants a divorce. It's frenetically told but also unfolds like a perfectly relatable story about the chaos of life and the feeling of being pulled in a thousand directions at once. And then the multiverse opens up.

Stories about multiverses are myriad in popular culture. For proof, one need look no further than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Ironically, Daniels—Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert— turned down the opportunity to work on Loki , which dealt heavily in multiversal possibilities .) But rarely are they explored as in-depth and meaningfully as they are in Everything Everywhere . Evelyn's foray into her multiverse gives her perspective, a chance to reconcile her boring job, whiny husband, and troublesome daughter with versions of her life in which she's a hibachi chef, movie star, and—in a twist—a literal rock. Equal parts soul-searching and sci-fi, Kwan and Scheinert's movie takes all of this to its emotional and logical extremes. But instead of arriving at some nihilistic conclusion, it poses a more optimistic question: If there are no rules, no consequences, then why not go wild?

Absurdity courses through every scene. Navigation of the multiverse involves performing silly, random actions like eating lip balm or accepting an award, and each time Evelyn or a member of her family makes a decision, another timeline branches off. The point is that seemingly small or inconsequential decisions can lead to radically different outcomes. Throughout Everything Everywhere , characters perform ridiculous actions in order to gain new abilities, but in the end it's the minuscule and unlikely ones that ultimately change the course of the party Evelyn throws for her father.

At the onset, it's easy to see why Evelyn is frustrated with her job, her husband, her daughter. But after seeing the many ways their lives could have unfolded, the countless possibilities of who they could have become, a deeper truth emerges. If nothing matters, then the only thing that can matter is what you choose. The multiverse might contain an infinite amount of pain and heartbreak, but it also contains an infinite amount of creativity, passion, beauty, and connection.

Through that lens, cynicism itself gets distilled down to just another choice. It's not naive or ignorant to choose to value little moments, small acts of kindness. In a world where so much can feel insignificant, choosing cruelty or hopelessness has no greater value than opting for kindness and empathy. If anything, choosing destruction only accelerates entropy.

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Everything Everywhere doesn't just reject cynicism, it refutes it. And that might be its most defining value. The film takes the concept of an infinite multiverse—and by extension, the vast, overwhelming nature of our own experiences—and examines it both critically and compassionately. It, quite literally at times, stares into the void and doesn't blink as the void stares back.

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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–

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: Chaos Reigns – and So Does Michelle Yeoh – in Unhinged Multiverse Movie

Hyperactive directing duo “the Daniels” swing for the fences with this exhausting existential comedy, wherein a Chinese woman stares infinity in the kisser.

By Peter Debruge

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Way back in 1998, before Marvel made multiverses a household concept, Gwyneth Paltrow starred in a lovely parallel-realities drama called “Sliding Doors,” in which a woman’s life split along two paths, depending on whether or not her character caught a specific train. At the time, juggling these competing fates was considered to be so demanding that the filmmakers obliged one of the two Gwyneths to get a haircut, so audiences could tell them apart.

Produced by comrades in maximalism the Russo brothers, the result is a mess, but a meticulously planned and executed mess, where every shot, every sound effect and every sight gag fits exactly as the Daniels intended into this dense and cacophonous eyesore, which endeavors to capture the staggering burden of trying to exist in a world of boundless choice (an idea Jaco Van Dormael’s “Mr. Nobody” did with comparable complexity). It’s a hyperactive solution for today’s attention-deficit audiences, who’ve been bombarded by bad news — of pandemics and protests and imminent world wars — and whose real concerns boil down to the basics, like getting along with their parents or scrounging the money to pay the rent.

Scheinert and Kwan are style-over-substance directors who desperately want their films to be as profound as they are formally inventive. Their 2016 feature debut, “Swiss Army Man,” was the same way: a pageant of gonzo Michel Gondry-like invention that quieted down in the final stretch to make a sincere statement against suicide. This one looks at the intense parent-child bond in one Asian family — especially the impossible demands that the immigrant mom puts on her daughter — and argues that letting go while loving unconditionally is the answer.

There are enough ideas in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” to fuel a dozen movies, or else a full-blown TV series, but the Daniels have shoehorned it all into a bombastic, emotionally draining 139 minutes. Moviegoers with limber imaginations may well appreciate the lunatic ambition and nutso execution of this high-concept hurricane, which ricochets like a live-action cartoon for most of that duration. But less versatile viewers will emerge frazzled, like Wile E. Coyote after swallowing a stick of dynamite: their heads charred, blinking blankly as smoke wafts from their ears.

As much as narrative innovation typically excites me, I confess to falling in the latter category this time around, unable to grasp the movie’s overcomplicated sci-fi logic, which takes the red-pill mind-screw of “The Matrix” and multiplies it by infinity. It’s “The OA” on acid. Yeoh plays immigrant matriarch Evelyn Wang, who operates a laundromat with husband Raymond (Ke Huy Quan, who played Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and Data in “The Goonies,” now all grown up) that’s being audited by the IRS. As if her tax woes weren’t enough, she’s saddled with personal issues too: Nothing she does is good enough for her father, Gong Gong (James Hong), which in turn informs the way Evelyn treats her exasperated adult daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu).

Raymond has drawn up divorce papers, but instead of serving them, he’s overcome by a quivering sensation on the way to the tax office, whereby a version of Raymond from a parallel universe occupies his body. This more agile proxy performs an impromptu mental scan of Evelyn, instructing her how to access her alternate lives, unlocking all kinds of kooky Charlie Kaufman-esque possibilities. Evelyn doesn’t know what to think, but follows Not-Raymond’s directions, which allow her to “verse-jump.”

Things only get more intimidating from there, as the quantum-leaping Raymond explains the rules that an alternate Evelyn discovered. Apparently, she’s some sort of big-brain physicist in another dimension, whereas she learns “you’re living your worst you” in this one — meaning that every other possible Evelyn made more successful life choices. One became a huge Hong Kong action star (that Evelyn is closest to real-life Yeoh), others an opera singer, a maid or a teppanyaki-style chef. The Daniels present as many of these realities as possible in short, zany micro-sketches. There’s even a universe in which everyone has hot dogs for fingers, and rather than cutting to that scenario just once, the directors bring it back again and again as an extended joke. Same thing with a running gag about a world where people are mind-controlled by raccoons.

One can’t help wondering what, if anything, wound up on the editing room floor in this movie, which shifts into dark, apocalyptic mode relatively early, as a demented alternate version of Deirdre comes after Evelyn like a broke-down, Lane Bryant-clad Terminator. But the evil IRS auditor isn’t the true antagonist here. Nor are the vaguely Agent Smith-like security guards. The real threat is Joy, Evelyn’s daughter, on whom Mom has piled life’s many disappointments, to the point that Joy finally snapped. She has reinvented herself as an entity known as Jobu Tupaki, who jumps from universe to universe murdering Evelyns and leaving a trail of chaos in her wake.

Great storytellers make sense of chaos, whereas the Daniels gleefully embrace it, amplifying the headachy sensation with rapid editing and Son Lux’s broken-pipes score. “Everything Everywhere” recognizes that life can be overwhelming, that family dynamics are tricky and the world isn’t fair. It counters those challenges with an unexpected sense of optimism, even as a giant CG everything bagel comes bursting through a parallel dimension to swallow up all that Evelyn holds dear. As the Daniels riffle manically between the dozen or so worlds they’ve created, we hardly notice that perhaps only 10 principal characters populate them. By keeping the cast small, they make it slightly easier to distinguish between the various realities — including one that can’t sustain life, in which Evelyn and Joy appear as rocks — but still can’t resist the kind of meta humor that inspires the feint where faux credits roll at the 85-minute mark. (Would that this were the end!)

Reviewed at Sepulveda Screening Room, Los Angeles, March 9, 2022. In SXSW Film Festival (opener). MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 139 MIN.

Production: An A24 release of a Gozie Agbo presentation of a Ley Line Entertainment production. Producers: Joe Russo, Anthony Russo, Mike Larocca, Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, Jonathan Wang. Executive producers: Tim Headington, Theresa Steele Page, Todd Makurath, Josh Rudnik, Michelle Yeoh. Co-producers: Allison Rose Carter, Jon Read, Sarah Halley Finn.
Crew: Directors, writers: Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert. Camera: Larkin Seiple. Editor: Paul Rogers. Music: Son Lux. Music supervisors: Lauren Marie Milkus, Bruce Gilbert
With: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tallie Medel, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr., Biff Wiff. (English, Mandarin, Cantonese dialogue)

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Everything Everywhere All at Once Dizzies Itself Into Transcendence

Jobu Tapaki (Stephanie Hsu), the universe-hopping villain of Everything Everywhere All at Once , wears ensembles of escalating outrageousness over the course of the film: a matching plaid cape trench and visor set, a stylized golfing costume, an Elvis-esque rhinestoned jumpsuit. Omnipotence may saddle you with a sense of crushing nihilism, but it also nets you a fabulous wardrobe, which is why, when Jobu shows off the all-consuming object of annihilation she’s built, she does it in a futuristic riff on an elaborate Elizabethan gown. Anything is possible in Everything Everywhere All at Once , a work whose dazzling, dizzying qualities can be summed up in every one of Jobu’s impossible outfit changes. And yet the costuming choice that best explains why the film is such a knockout is a knit jacket that its heroine, Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), wears during the Chinese New Year party that she and her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), are throwing. It’s a perfect article of pragmatic Chinese matron fashion, selected with affection and humor — red, with floral patterns down the sleeves, and on the back, as a decorative non sequitur, it reads, “PUNK.”

Evelyn is not a punk. She’s a harried small-business owner in Simi Valley who’s having trouble paying her taxes. Around a decade ago, a now-defunct Tumblr called Accidental Chinese Hipsters used to document items like Evelyn’s “PUNK” sweater as evidence of the overlap between semi-ironic scenesterism and Chinatown granny styling. The joke was that the cool kids could only dream of matching the oblivious swagger of an elderly Chinese man in a sweater vest and a night-market beanie emblazoned with “Die Yuppie Scum.” But underscoring the project was an understanding of how unremarked upon its subjects otherwise were, considered invisible even in their ubiquity in laboring to keep the world running.

To note that Evelyn is not the kind of woman whose interior landscape gets explored onscreen is an understatement. Evelyn has all but merged into the backdrop of the laundromat that she and Waymond own, live above, and are in danger of losing, offering herself up on the altar of work out of habit more than anything. Her marriage to the happy-go-lucky Waymond is on the rocks. Her relationship with her depressive daughter Joy, whose queerness she can begrudgingly tolerate but whose professional inertia she can’t, is desperately estranged. Her disapproving father (James Hong) has arrived from China for a visit. The Wangs are also in the process of being audited by the surly Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis). On top of all of that, Evelyn keeps getting contacted by forces from another reality who claim she’s the only one who can save the universe.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is the second feature from the directing duo of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, a.k.a. Daniels, who started in music videos and inventive shorts before graduating to the 2016 film Swiss Army Man . That inventive, juvenile, and ultimately tiresome dramedy, which starred Paul Dano as a marooned, suicidal man and Daniel Radcliffe as the farting corpse he rides across the ocean back to civilization, really showed off the pair’s strengths and weaknesses. They strive for a mix of the profane and the transcendent, and also like to follow a dumb joke way past its logical conclusion and back around to a (hopefully) moving conclusion. They may have retained their fondness for things getting stuck up butts, but they’ve grown over the years, and Everything Everywhere All at Once is something approaching a maximalist masterpiece. It’s also about 15 to 20 percent more movie than it needs to be, and gets bogged down by its overabundance of ideas in the middle. The payoffs for Evelyn misremembering the concept of Ratatouille , for a universe in which everyone has hot-dog fingers, and the sentient-rock conversation would be more effective if one of them were snipped.

That said, it’s a movie with an extended bit about a misremembered Ratatouille , with a hot-dog-fingers reality, and with talking rocks. Evelyn learns, with the help of a tough-guy Waymond from another reality, to get in touch with the many other Evelyns across the multiverse, borrowing their skills as martial-arts movie stars, sign spinners, singers, and Benihana chefs in an effort to defeat Jobu Tapaki — only to realize that Jobu Tapaki is a dark version of Joy who was broken by her mother’s pressures to succeed. Snapping in bursts from universe to universe, Everything Everywhere All at Once constantly courts sensory overload, lining up the edges of surreal domestic scenes and wuxia fights and a Wong Kar-wai street-scene homage and the windowless confines of the IRS, and moving between them, sometimes too quickly to register. But for all its own garbled mythology, which it doesn’t take especially seriously, always at its core are the Wangs and the hurt they keep doing to one another in the name of love.

March has been a big month for movies about mothers, daughters, and diasporic Asian angst. Turning Red pitted a 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl against the controlling affection of her mother, with a side of boy bands and magical pandas. Umma went for the horror treatment, with Sandra Oh as a Korean American single mom harboring secrets about the past, though it actually landed in the realm of camp. Everything Everywhere All at Once is the most sprawling of them all, a story of disappointment and miscommunication and the burden of expectations across generations, and of the three, it’s the only one to center the immigrant parent instead of looking on from the point of view of their kid. The film extends an empathy toward Evelyn that’s deeply moving and long in coming, giving consideration to her in all her shortcomings — her impatience, her callousness with those close to her, her inability to finish anything, her doubts — and then finding in her generosity and grace as well.

It’s a euphoric showcase for Yeoh, bringing the superstar down to earth and then flinging her back into space, but it’s also a poignant return to the screen for former child star Quan, who as Waymond is the tender heart of the film, as well as someone who can use a fanny pack as a rope dart in combat. Everything Everywhere All at Once may be a kaleidoscopic fantasy battle across space, time, genres, and emotions, but it’s an incredibly moving family drama first. Maybe there’s something punk about it after all.

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Entertainment
Everything Everywhere All At Once is charming, sprawling, and completely ridiculous

Martial arts meets surreal sci-fi

By Adi Robertson , a senior tech and policy editor focused on VR, online platforms, and free expression. Adi has covered video games, biohacking, and more for The Verge since 2011.

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Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once

Perhaps the weirdest thing about Everything Everywhere All At Once , a film in which a notable plot point involves riffing on 2001: A Space Odyssey to explain an alternate reality where humans evolved hot dogs for fingers, is that it sometimes doesn’t feel that weird. Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, it lies at the intersection of a frenetic music video marathon, a slapstick martial arts comedy, and a surrealist sci-fi pastiche. But it’s anchored in an earnest family drama that’s elevated by a series of great performances, particularly from central star Michelle Yeoh.

There’s a whole lot going on in Everything Everywhere , but the basic gist is straightforward. Evelyn Wang (Yeoh) is the harried owner of a failing laundromat and a messy, unsatisfying life. Her apparently milquetoast husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) has served her with divorce papers, her perpetually demanding father’s (James Hong) health is failing, and her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is frustrated by Evelyn’s own snippy disapproval. A ruthless IRS worker named Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis) is auditing her for, among countless other dubious decisions, claiming a karaoke machine as a tax expense.

Then, as Evelyn is making a last-ditch attempt to save her business, Waymond’s body is suddenly possessed by a counterpart from one of near-infinite alternate realities. He tells her she’s the only person who can save the multiverse from a reality-destroying menace. And she still has to get her taxes done.

As alt-Waymond acknowledges, the multiverse’s precise mechanics are complex and not always logical. “Verse-jumpers” can use earpieces to puppet the bodies of their alternate selves, and they can osmose skills from counterparts in other worlds by performing pivotal actions that set their lives on different paths. (For unexplained reasons, most of these tasks are painful or gross, like getting paper cuts or eating chapstick.) The process opens a slight psychic link between the counterparts, and for verse-jumpers who push themselves too far, comprehending this range of infinite possibilities can lead to a devastating existential crisis.

Everything Everywhere’s multiverse opens the door to entertaining dream logic

The setup offers Kwan and Scheinert a chance to pinball between a host of mini-narratives and a truly dizzying number of colorful costume changes, and it justifies a series of eccentric martial arts sequences that essentially work on dream logic. Everything Everywhere’s fight scenes are more entertaining, more creative, and better-shot than those of many full-fledged action movies, including ones from the very cinematic franchises it’s clearly drawing on. (They’re far more fun than almost anything in the Marvel films made by the Russo brothers, who served as producers here.)

Yeoh’s main self is a pitch-perfect confused everywoman who can suddenly pull off incredible acrobatic feats tempered by goofy physical comedy, while her other personas showcase her effortless charisma. Quan shifts fluidly between his hapless primary-universe self and his hyper-competent alter-ego, with both tone and body language flipping in split-second transitions. Even Curtis, introduced as a snide bureaucrat, gets a menacing turn in one of her many personas.

Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh, and James Hong in Everything Everywhere All At Once

Everything Everywhere is full of intricate connections and Chekhov’s guns that cohere more on an aesthetic level than a narrative one. It’s constantly looping back to build extended multiverse vignettes from minor details earlier in the film, including jokes that range from mild to fairly crass. (This is a good time to mention that Kwan and Scheinert also directed Swiss Army Man , a film that starred Daniel Radcliffe as a flatulent corpse.) A few of these callbacks feel extraneous, and based on a Q&A session following the film’s SXSW premiere, that’s after at least one subplot was left on the cutting room floor. But they help sell the film’s humor by spinning cinematic references and throwaway gags — what if you put, like, everything on a bagel, man — into deadpan scenes delivered with visual flair.

What if you put, like, everything on a bagel

The dramatic elements still don’t always add up. Everything Everywhere’s sci-fi sequences can be written like they’re marking time between absurdities, peppered with expository dialogue that doesn’t gel with the more compelling and naturalistic exchanges elsewhere. The script is full of monologues about life and humanity that sound good in isolation but are shuffled around as abruptly as the film’s costumes, asserting character motivations that haven’t been well-established before that moment.

Even so, the relationship between Evelyn, Joy, Waymond, and (unexpectedly) Deirdre builds up to something sweet that stays just a hair away from being cloying. Everything Everywhere’s individual personas are largely archetypes, albeit archetypes that aren’t often seen in mainstream sci-fi movies. But the film treats them as complementary facets of a single complicated person rather than a plethora of separate entities. There’s no cheap ambiguity about whether any of the film’s events are happening — the multiverse definitely exists, and it contains people whose fingers are definitely hot dogs — but its array of worlds have the vibe of fantasies that highlight aspects of the characters’ core selves, making them more than gimmicks or weirdness for its own sake.

Stephanie Hsu in Everything Everywhere All At Once

This might be due less to the script than to the cast, who bring consistency to the most nonsensical scenarios. Quan gives Waymond a resilient vulnerability that comes through even when he’s dragging Evelyn around the multiverse. While Hsu gets less screen time as her original-universe character, she balances being viciously nihilistic and hopelessly lost as one of Joy’s alter egos. Deirdre is legitimately mean, but — like many real-world jerks — capable of kindness and affection.

And in a film evoking countless earlier movies about disaffected losers who discover they’re secretly heroes, Yeoh offers a poignant and magnetic take on the trope. Her protagonist is disappointed in life but still a functioning, mature human being surrounded by people who are flawed but ultimately decent. Evelyn’s plunge into the multiverse is foreshadowed by the way she navigates her multigenerational and multilingual family, her rapid-fire dialog switching between Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. One of Everything Everywhere’s running jokes is that its protagonist is literally the least talented possible version of herself, but the gaps between Evelyn’s selves never seem jarring — you can believe that a few decisions separate a beleaguered laundromat owner from a master chef or opera singer.

For all the bizarre stuff that’s thrown into Everything Everywhere, Kwan and Scheinert’s riskiest move is arguably picking a nearly 140-minute runtime for a comedy built around deliberate tonal whiplash, a potentially polarizing style of humor, and an exhausting pace. Everything Everywhere is a giant tangled yarn ball of a movie, and if it doesn’t work for you, that feeling will last for a very, very long time. If it does work, though, it might be one of the most charmingly ridiculous movies you see this year.

Everything Everywhere All At Once debuts in theaters on March 25th

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Everything Everywhere All At Once Review

13 May 2022

Everything Everywhere All At Once

At the exact moment Everything Everywhere All At Once is about to kick into overdrive, Michelle Yeoh ’s Evelyn reads a vital piece of advice: “P.S. Don’t forget to breathe.” Really, it’s  a missive to the audience — a necessary heads-up to, in the words of Jurassic Park ’s Mr Arnold, hold onto your butts. Because once it starts, it rarely stops — an all-out cinematic assault, a cacophony of creativity that dazzles, delights, and defies explanation with every passing second. Leaving you breathless is its entire MO.

Anyone who saw the first film from Daniels (that’s writer-director duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert ), Swiss Army Man , would expect as much. The pair’s feature debut was the infamous ‘ Daniel Radcliffe farting corpse’ movie — a film whose seemingly crass premise belied its surprisingly reflective ruminations on life, death and companionship. It’s impressive enough that Daniels have created a follow-up that, in its most out-there moments — and there are plenty of those — is just as jaw-droppingly wild; take a drink every time Everything Everywhere All At Once delivers something you’ve never seen on screen before, and you’d black out long before the closing credits. But more miraculous is that, once again, they balance the ‘did they actually just do that ?’ moments with such spectacular emotion, enriching the soul while confounding the senses. This is a Daniels film — the intersection of the profane and the profound is their comfort zone.

It is thunderously cinematic, revelling in the simplicity of filmmaking’s most basic tools, while deploying them to their maximum potential.

So much of that emotional depth comes from the fact that, beneath the multiversal mayhem, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a family story. Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn, a Chinese-American immigrant who runs a laundromat with husband Waymond ( The Goonies and Temple Of Doom star Ke Huy Quan , back on our screens at last), is primarily a woman teetering towards existential crisis. There is specificity in her story. But there is universality in the way that she feels — overwhelmed by the relentlessness of her life, consumed by everything, everywhere, all at once. She has a business to run, taxes to file, customers to please, a father to live up to, a husband to argue with, and — most importantly — a daughter she increasingly cannot relate to. Subsequently, she’s closed off, trapped under the weight of her failed hopes and dreams, struggling to perpetuate a life she has no passion for. It’s a set-up expertly established in a claustrophobic opening reel, set in the cramped chaos of the Wang home — a taut ticking-clock of noise, motion and clashing conversations, radiating Uncut Gems -style stress.

It’s so compelling, you almost don’t want the sci-fi stuff to intrude. But when it does, it does  so spectacularly, Waymond’s ‘Alphaverse’ self opening Evelyn’s mind to alternate universes  in which she’s all the things she ever wanted to be: a singer, a chef, an action-movie star. With multiversal evil Jobu Tupaki (“an agent of pure chaos”) threatening to bring everything to an end, it’s up to Evelyn to ‘Verse-Jump’ into her other life-paths and tap into those skills to  fight back. What follows are pulse-pounding martial-arts brawls to rival The Matrix and   The Raid , gonzo expeditions into bizarro alt-dimensions (hot-dog hands, anyone?), and delightfully bonkers riffs on everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ratatouille to In The Mood For Love . In its more existential second half, the film tugs deeply on those familial threads, espousing joy and connectivity as necessary forces to combat nihilism.

The magic of Everything Everywhere All At Once is in its title — within it, you’ll find every genre, experience every emotion. It’s both a reflection of, and an oasis from, the incessant overstimulation of 21st-century life. So many films would collapse in on themselves under  that kind of pressure. EEAAO never does. It is thunderously cinematic, revelling in the simplicity of filmmaking’s most basic tools, while deploying them to their maximum potential. And it is brilliantly performed — Stephanie Hsu is revelatory as the multifaceted Joy; Quan is astonishing in his cinematic comeback, an action master who’ll make your heart explode too; Jamie Lee Curtis has a blast exaggerating the monstrous physicality of a no-bullshit tax officer; and Yeoh is perfection, drawing on every skill from every role she’s ever played to bring Evelyn’s many lives to life.

This is a radical film, about radical love and radical acceptance. It’s the biggest-hearted movie you can imagine that also features someone being beaten to death with two massive, floppy dildos. You’ll goggle at the (literal) ballsiest fight scene ever committed to film. You’ll cry at a shot of two rocks. You’ll never look at a bagel the same way. Don’t forget to breathe.

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Everything Everywhere All At Once – Oscars 2023

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BAFTA nominations – Everything Everywhere, Banshees, All Quiet On The Western Front

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

By Richard Brody

Harry Shum Jr. and Michelle Yeoh in scene.

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.

The photo caption on this article has been updated.

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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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Jamie Lee Curtis

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Review: ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ is, for better or worse, exactly that

A woman stands in front of another woman and a man with her arms out, as if protecting them.

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At the beginning of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the camera creeps slowly toward a circular mirror — an apt start for a movie that will soon whoosh its characters through one looking glass after another. Amid all the whooshing, though, try to hold on to the image of that circle, which isn’t the easiest thing to do amid all the sights and sounds, frenzied fight scenes and grotesque sight gags that Daniels — a.k.a. the writing-directing duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert ( “Swiss Army Man” ) — have crammed into their latest surreal head-spinner of a movie.

Still, they do leave a trail of metaphysical breadcrumbs, or perhaps I should say bagel crumbs. That circle will recur throughout the movie, first in the glass door of a washing machine and later as an extremely literal “everything bagel,” a giant cosmic doughnut that has been sprinkled with flecks of every piece of matter that has ever existed. Is this bagel the circle of life or perhaps the Circle of Eternal Return, a concept that pops up in the work of the German novelist Michael Ende and the Ukrainian artist Valerii Lamakh? It feels more like a black hole, destined to swallow up everything and everyone because, at the end of the day, as one character puts it, “nothing matters.”

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Does your head hurt yet, or just your soul? Running a funny, messy, moving, grotesque, sometimes exhilarating and often exasperating 140 minutes, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” can be a pain and knows it; it might also be its own cure. Crammed with ideas, jokes, laments, non sequiturs and some terrific actors you’ve seen before (if not nearly enough), the movie comes at you like a warm hug wrapped in a kung fu chop: It’s both a sweet, sentimental story about a Chinese American family and a wild, maximalist sensory assault. In the end, its many swirling parts unite around a remarkably coherent purpose: to provide a rare and dazzling showcase for a megawatt performer who scowls, gasps, punches, kicks, leaps, flips, soars and finally transcends.

That would be Michelle Yeoh, who has long been one of Asia’s top action stars but — from early breakthroughs (“Tomorrow Never Dies,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) through prestige disappointments (“Memoirs of a Geisha,” “The Lady”) to a few high-profile supporting turns (“Crazy Rich Asians,” “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”) — has never enjoyed the spectacular Hollywood career she’s long deserved. (Even “Everything Everywhere,” originally conceived for Jackie Chan before Daniels decided to reconceive the lead as a woman, nearly eluded her as well.) The agony of what might have been haunts Yeoh’s stardom, and it also looms over her Evelyn Wang, a stressed-out, desperately unfulfilled woman who’s staring down the barrel of the IRS as the action gets underway.

Four people expectantly look at someone sitting in a cubicle.

A messy tax audit of her family-run laundromat isn’t the only thing weighing on Evelyn. She’s busy planning a birthday party for her overbearing dad (the great 93-year-old veteran James Hong), from whom she’s hiding the fact that her teenage daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), is a lesbian. (And has a girlfriend, played by Tallie Medel.) Evelyn also has a patient, long-suffering husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), whom she’s so used to neglecting that she hasn’t even noticed he’s filing for divorce. Then, during a visit to their cranky auditor, Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis), Evelyn is suddenly yanked out of her body — whoosh! — and transported into that of another Evelyn, and then another Evelyn, and then another Evelyn, all of them occupying their own distinct parallel universes.

Welcome, in other words, to the latest cinematic incarnation of the multiverse, in which an infinite number of parallel timelines suddenly converge in a maelstrom of controlled chaos. That concept, a longtime science fiction staple, has been repopularized of late in the last couple of Spider-Man features (and the forthcoming “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”), which makes it all the more welcome to see an iteration that doesn’t spring from a corporate-branded property. In this one, the multiverse has come under threat from an unstoppable evil force known as Jobu Tobacky, and Evelyn — despite or perhaps because of her utterly unremarkable existence — is the only one capable of defeating it. To do this, she will have to jump repeatedly between universes and, like a video-game paladin shifting fighting styles at will, absorb the special powers of her many, many fellow Evelyns.

These include, among others, Evelyn the Peking opera singer, Evelyn the Hong Kong movie star (cue a blink-and-you-miss-it shot of Yeoh attending the “Crazy Rich Asians” premiere), Evelyn the woman with hot dogs for fingers (don’t ask) and Evelyn the teppanyaki chef. Charmingly, a lot of these adventures seem to hark back to various late-’90s antecedents: Like Neo in “The Matrix,” Evelyn is a messiah-in-training who must learn to absorb powerful fighting techniques in the trippiest possible way. And like the indecisive heroines of “Sliding Doors” and “Run Lola Run,” though to a vastly more insane degree, she must entertain multiple possible versions of her own story — all in a movie that plays at times like a very long, very surreal “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel from which the pages have been torn out and then glued back together at random.

I will leave the actual mechanics of Evelyn’s interdimensional portal-hopping for you to discover; you’ll learn most of them from Waymond, who, through one of this multiverse’s many quirks, frequently doubles as an exposition delivery machine. Suffice it to say that the constantly evolving rules often require the characters to do gross, painful and embarrassing things, like inflict paper cuts on themselves, make photocopies of their nether-regions and use trophies as butt plugs. Kwan and Scheinert clearly haven’t abandoned the giddy anal fixations of “Swiss Army Man,” a.k.a. the movie that starred Daniel Radcliffe as a flatulent corpse. (And they say auteurism is dead.)

A woman stands in a fighting pose with papers flying in the air around her.

The directors’ signature mix of frenetic silliness and disarming sincerity unlocks something especially fresh and exciting in Yeoh. Given how often she’s been typecast as a figure of serene, Zen-like composure, it’s a tonic to see her play someone who so conspicuously doesn’t have her act together, a woman with blood on her brow, anxiety in her gaze and a voice that sometimes cracks as it rises several octaves above her usual register. (She’s an oddity, and also an auditee.) The result is as passionate and exhaustive a love letter as any filmmakers have ever written to their star, and Yeoh answers it by fusing action, comedy and drama with a grace and dexterity she’s seldom been given the chance to muster.

As it happens, Evelyn isn’t the only character popping up in multiple dimensions here, and Yeoh isn’t the only actor to turn multitasking into art. Curtis brings just the right demented comic edge to her many faces of Deirdre (most of them scowling, some of them sympathetic), while Hsu piercingly registers Joy’s sadness even amid a flurry of outlandish wardrobe changes (courtesy of costume designer Shirley Kurata). Most poignant of all is Quan, whom you’ll recognize as the ’80s child star who played Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and Data in “The Goonies.” His subsequent, yearslong rejection by an industry that didn’t know what to do with him is subtly referenced — and even rectified — in his performance as a husband and father with his own easily underestimated reserves of strength.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is thus a story of redemption and reconciliation, as sweet and sentimental at its core as it is deliriously busy on the surface. (The vibrant cinematography is by Larkin Seiple, the hyperaccelerated editing by Paul Rogers and the madly inventive production design by Jason Kisvarday.) As a drama of Asian mother-daughter conflict, it would make an appropriate double bill with Pixar’s current fantasy “Turning Red.” As a movie about the roads not taken, it taps into the inexhaustible wellspring of romantic melancholy that is Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love,” explicitly saluted in Evelyn’s most wistful timeline. Here, it isn’t just an irretrievable past that keeps flashing before her eyes; it’s all the tantalizing possibilities of a better, more fulfilling and meaningful life than the one she’s been leading.

And it is this very insistence on endless, simultaneous possibilities that leads me to render a verdict on “Everything Everywhere All at Once” that may seem inconclusive at best and craven at worst, but which I very much offer up in this movie’s endearing, maddening spirit. Is it a visionary triumph or a gaudy, overstuffed folly? Does it bog down in numbing repetition or discover, within that repetition, an aesthetic and philosophical energy all its own? Not to advance a circular argument, but yes to all of the above. I don’t know if this movie fully works in this universe, but I suspect it might in the next.

‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’

In English, Mandarin and Cantonese with English subtitles Rating: R, for some violence, sexual material and language Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes Playing: Starts March 25 in general release

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Michelle yeoh in ‘everything everywhere all at once’: film review | sxsw 2022.

A Chinese American laundromat owner fretting over a tax audit gets pulled into a violent multiverse clash in this sci-fi adventure comedy by the filmmaking team known as Daniels.

By David Rooney

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In 2016’s Swiss Army Man , gonzo auteur duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert made an aggressive bid for cult immortality by casting Daniel Radcliffe as a flatulent corpse so gaseous he could double as a decomposing jet ski. So it shouldn’t be surprising that one of the triggers for characters jumping between parallel universes in Everything Everywhere All at Once is to take a flying leap and impale themselves on jumbo butt plugs. Or to be precise, Internal Revenue Service Employee of the Month Awards unmistakably shaped like those sex toys, which doesn’t make the gag any less puerile.

Nothing if not true to its title, this frenetically plotted serve of stoner heaven is insanely imaginative and often a lot of fun. But at two hours-plus, it becomes unrelenting and wearisome. While a certain degree of chaotic maximalist overload seems inherent to any film about a multiverse rippling with a violent threat, the nonstop jumble of mad invention here sacrifices control.

Full credits

Venue: SXSW Film Festival (Opening Night) Distributor: A24 Production companies: Gozie Agbo, Year of the Rat, in association with Ley Line Entertainment Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tallie Medel, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr., Biff Wiff, Sunita Mani, Aaron Lazar, Brian Le, Andy Le, Neravana Cabral, Chelsey Goldsmith, Craig Henningsen Director-screenwriters: Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert Producers: Joe Russo, Anthony Russo, Mike Larocca, Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, Jonathan Wang Executive producers: Tim Headington, Theresa Steele Page, Todd Makurath, Josh Rudnik, Michelle Yeoh Director of photography: Larkin Seiple Production designer: Jason Kisvarday Costume designer: Shirley Kurata Music: Son Lux Editor: Paul Rogers Visual effects supervisor: Zak Stoltz Casting: Sarah Halley Finn

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Everything everywhere all at once, common sense media reviewers.

Weird, wonderful genre-busting adventure has some violence.

A Lot or a Little?

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

Encourages courage, empathy, honesty, self-control

Evelyn isn't always likable, but she literally con

Movie centers a 50-something Chinese woman and her

In addition to martial arts-inspired fight sequenc

In a scene where all versions of Evelyn are quickl

Occasional strong language includes "f--k," "f---i

iPhone. Multiple references to movie Ratatouille,

Brief scenes show characters smoking cigarettes an

Positive Messages

Encourages courage, empathy, honesty, self-control, teamwork. Stresses importance of self-awareness, acceptance, resilience. Reminds viewers not to underestimate the power of laughter and small moments, that life is more about who you're with than what you have. Parent-child issues are a major theme. Story explores heavy topics such as depression, ennui, marital disappointment, and homophobia -- but with a heavy dose of levity, googly eyes, and hope.

Positive Role Models

Evelyn isn't always likable, but she literally contains multitudes. She's brave, strong-willed, and fierce. She recognizes her failures and asks for forgiveness. Waymond is goofy, optimistic, kind. Even when Evelyn is cruel or apathetic, Waymond remains devoted to their family. Joy is depressed but also loves her partner and wants to heal her unhealthy relationship. There's even a lot more to Deirdre, who's surprisingly patient and forgiving.

Diverse Representations

Movie centers a 50-something Chinese woman and her family in a way that isn't stereotypical, despite the fact that they own a laundromat in the current multiverse. Joy is queer and has a girlfriend she's trying to include in family events. Strong multigenerational theme.

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Violence & Scariness

In addition to martial arts-inspired fight sequences between Evelyn and the forces from the other verses, several characters from the multiverse die and battle with weapons (usually found objects, from a fanny pack to a trophy, but also real weapons). Some violence is comic, some bloody and realistic.

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

Sex, Romance & Nudity

In a scene where all versions of Evelyn are quickly shown, a couple are making love, showing her face and naked shoulders (these are blink-and-miss moments). Evelyn and her husband (or different versions of him) kiss in a few scenes. Phallic sex toys are used in a fight scene. Suggestive joke about a sex toy (a "butt plug") that's used as a prize for IRS auditors; later, two different men use it to invoke their special skills. In one case, the man who uses it is naked from the waist down. His crotch area is obscured, but audiences can see his butt during the fight scenes.

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

Occasional strong language includes "f--k," "f---ing," "holy s--t," "s--t," "stupid," etc.

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

Products & Purchases

iPhone. Multiple references to movie Ratatouille , which Evelyn thinks has to do with a raccoon instead of a rat.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Brief scenes show characters smoking cigarettes and marijuana and drinking.

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 Everything Everywhere All at Once is a trippy sci-fi/fantasy martial arts adventure from the directors of the dark comedy Swiss Army Man . It centers on a middle-aged laundromat owner named Evelyn ( Michelle Yeoh ), who discovers she must help save the multiverse during a routine trip to file her business taxes. Expect occasional strong language (mostly several uses of "f--k" and "s--t"), as well as plenty of violence, including stylized martial arts sequences that use both real and improvised weapons and include close-range brawling. There are a few deaths and a couple of bloody scenes. People kiss, there are super-quick shots of the main character making love (the focus is on her face or back), and you'll see fighting sex toys (both as weapons and skill amplifiers). Diverse representation includes a non-stereotypical Chinese American family and two women over 50 in central roles, as well as two women in a loving and supportive relationship. Families will have plenty to discuss after watching the movie, which is best suited for older teens and adults. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parents say (30)
Kids say (62)

Based on 30 parent reviews

Bloody sex toys as weapons?

Rated r for a reason, what's the story.

In EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, Evelyn Wong ( Michelle Yeoh ) and her husband, Waymond ( Ke Huy Quan ), have an important appointment to file their taxes at their local IRS office because their laundromat's business taxes are under review. Complicating the day is Evelyn's elderly father ( James Hong ), who's visiting from China, and her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who tried to introduce her girlfriend to him, much to Evelyn's chagrin. On the way to see their IRS agent, Deirdre ( Jamie Lee Curtis ), with a shopping caddy full of receipts, Evelyn has a bizarre encounter with Waymond, who explains that at that moment, he's a Waymond from the multiverse and that she could be just the Evelyn he's looking for in an attempt to defeat a common villain who's about to destroy the universe with cult-like devotees. She's just one of many Evelyns across the multiverse, and in order to "verse jump" to attain her other selves' skills, she has to perform tasks both wacky and mundane, like switching shoes to the wrong feet, drinking half-and-half, giving herself four papercuts, and, in one case, sitting on a butt plug. Using all of her other versions' skills, Evelyn just might be able to keep the villain from sucking everyone and everything into the void.

Is It Any Good?

A crowd-pleasing, genre-bending adventure that's funny, dizzying, and infinitely memorable, this movie is also a lot . If the screenplays for Kung Fu Hustle , The Matri x , Being John Malkovich , Spaceballs , Kill Bill , and Spider-Man: No Way Home were blended together, the result would approximate this movie. There's much to keep track of, and the filmmakers ingeniously wrap layers and layers onto what sounds like a boring framing story: A 50-something Chinese couple tries to refile their taxes on the same day they throw a party at their laundromat to impress their elderly father/father-in-law. But there's nothing remotely boring or predictable about what happens throughout the day, as Evelyn expands her consciousness through the silliest of tasks to psychically visit other versions of herself based on all the "sliding door" decisions she's made. The cast is all praise-worthy, but particular kudos go to Yeoh, Quan, and Curtis for their joyously watchable performances. Hsu and Hong are also fabulous as the melancholy (and ironically named) Joy and the stubborn Chinese father who each have a complicated relationship with Evelyn.

Speaking of joy, it's best to see this film knowing only that it's worth seeing. While there aren't a lot of huge twists, there's a definite nonsensical and communal energy to it all, and it's ideal to watch it surrounded by laughing, cringing, and even crying moviegoers. One multiverse sight gag worth teasing involves a Ratatouille -like conceit, except the animal is a raccoon, not a rat. That one features Harry Shum Jr. as the Linguini-like chef at a Japanese steakhouse where one of the multi-Evelyns works. It's not only hilarious, but, like the movie, surprisingly touching. Parent-child issues are a major theme, and the story explores heavy topics such as depression, ennui, marital disappointment, and homophobia, but with a heavy dose of levity, googly eyes, and hope.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in Everything Everywhere All at Once . When is it funny, and when is it dark? What's the impact of it, and why is it necessary to the story?

Discuss mental health and family dynamics and how they're depicted in the movie. What do the main characters learn from their experiences?

Which of the multiverse Evelyns was your favorite? How did all of the Evelyns' skills help the main Evelyn fulfill her destiny? How about the various Waymonds?

Discuss the importance of racial, ethnic, and generational representation in popular culture . Can you think of other movies that center Asian characters or older women?

How do the characters demonstrate courage , empathy , self-control , and teamwork ? What makes those important character strengths ?

Movie Details

In theaters : March 25, 2022
On DVD or streaming : June 7, 2022
Cast : Michelle Yeoh , Ke Huy Quan , Stephanie Hsu
Directors : Dan Kwan , Daniel Scheinert
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Asian actors
Studio : A24
Genre : Action/Adventure
Topics : STEM , Sports and Martial Arts
Character Strengths : Courage , Empathy , Self-control , Teamwork
Run time : 132 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : some violence, sexual material
Awards : Academy Award , Golden Globe
Last updated : March 20, 2024

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‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Review

Supremely silly, profoundly moving, and potentially great..

Everything Everywhere All at Once is simultaneously supremely silly and profoundly moving, a film that hides its earnestness under multiple layers of jokes without dipping into deadening ironic detachment. Plus: there’s kung fu and talking rocks and an everything bagel that really has everything and looks a little like a black hole.

Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) can’t quite see that she’s on the verge of losing it all. Her laundromat to the taxwoman, Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis). Her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), to divorce. Her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), to the world. And the world—all the worlds, every one of them in the multiverse—to Jobu Tupaki (also Hsu), a malevolent force of chaotic energy that gained access to everything, everywhere, all at once, and went mad as a result, trying to track down and kill every Evelyn in every corner of the multiverse.

Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (the co-writers and co-directors who are known, collectively, as “Daniels”) conceive of the multiverse as a way to instantly download skills needed to fight Jobu Tupaki. With the aid of a Bluetooth headset and the re-creation of a memory that comes from something unique to happen in each multiverse that sent each iteration of a person down wildly divergent paths—something as silly as eating a tube of lip gloss or as horrifying as accidentally blinding yourself as a child by breaking a fall onto a pair of sticks with your eyeballs—Evelyn can learn kung fu or become an amazing singer or learn how to use her feet to perform everyday tasks just as she’d need to if an evolutionary quirk left people with hot dogs for fingers. It’s kind of like the training programs from The Matrix , just with the multiverse instead of an AI construct.

I have streamlined this as much as possible because the actual mechanics don’t matter that much and would probably drive you mad if you thought about them logically for too long. Suffice to say that the effect is comic, that the multiverses are amusingly divergent, and that Evelyn has a guide in this adventure in the form of her husband from the so-called alphaverse, the first point in the multiverse to discover the multiverse and figure out how to “communicate” from -verse to -verse.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is almost aggressively silly, using the idea of the multiverse and the suggestion that literally anything can happen at any point, anywhere to do things like change blood into organic ketchup or blow minds like they’re confetti. (Literally.) At one point a character realizes that the unique memory he has to generate to hop from -verse to -verse involves the use of a trophy that looks more than a little like a buttplug, and, I mean, if you can’t imagine how that plays out or how it could be done in a way that generates genuine belly laughs, well, maybe this isn’t the movie for you.

But the silliness is deployed by Daniels as cover to keep cynics in the audience from being overwhelmed by the earnestness at the heart of Everything Everywhere All at Once . This is a deeply moving movie, an extended meditation on the meaning we derive from family and friendship. On the power of kindness. It’s a rousing rejection of the irony-soaked meme-mind that has so come to dominate the political and cultural discourse, the “lol nothing matters” state of mind that so many of us have adopted to protect our psyches from the realization that we have very little impact on macro trends. And it all works because Ke Huy Quan gives one of the best, most heartfelt performances I’ve ever seen on the big screen. Love—for his wife Evelyn, for their daughter Joy, even for the taxwoman Deirdre—pours out of him, overwhelms the bloody ugliness onscreen.

Everyone in this movie is great. Yeoh is always great, so no surprise there. Hsu simply nails the dual nature of being young—the simultaneous desire to be loved and to reject everything at the same time. Evelyn’s father is played by the legendary James Hong ( Blade Runner , Wayne’s World , and maybe more movies than anyone else ) and it’s always a pleasure to see him onscreen. They all seem to have genuine affection for each other, and that’s where the movie’s power resides. Everything Everywhere All at Once is, ultimately, a story of family and the way in which family does more to define us or give us purpose than anything else.

In a better, more elegant age, Daniels’s blending of genres and deft combination of deep emotion and spontaneous gusts of laughter would make Everything Everywhere All at Once an enormous, monstrous hit at the box office, one that played for months and found new audiences every week as it expanded around the country. It has the potential to be a generation-defining film, the sort of picture that shows why movies matter and how movies can move us. The way I felt walking out of Everything Everywhere All at Once reminded me of how I felt after The Matrix : I’ve never seen anything quite like it and immediately wanted to see it again. Do yourself a favor and watch it as soon as you can on as big a screen as you can.

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DVD & Streaming

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Action/Adventure , Comedy , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

March 25, 2022
Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang; Stephanie Hsu as Joy Wang; Ke Huy Quan as Waymond Wang; James Hong as Gong Gong; Jamie Lee Curtis as Deirdre Beaubeirdra; Tallie Medel as Becky Sregor; Jenny Slate as Big Nose; Harry Shum Jr. as Chad; Biff Wiff as Rick

Home Release Date

June 7, 2022
Dan Kwan; Daniel Scheinert

Distributor

Movie review.

If I invited you to a movie about a laundromat owner undergoing a tax audit, you’d probably ask me to stop inviting you to watch boring movies.

But what if I told you the movie explores philosophy through the multiverse?

Yes, they’re the same movie.

Evelyn Wang lives a stressful life. The IRS is hounding the family laundromat; she’s needing to prepare food for her ever-ungrateful father; her daughter, Joy, despises her; and her husband, Waymond, is thinking of filing for divorce.

But if she thought it couldn’t get any more stressful, well, she’s wrong. Because suddenly, Waymond starts acting erratically. He informs her that the multiverse is real, an evil being known as the Jobu Tupaki is seeking to kill and destroy everything in it and the laundromat-owning Evelyn is the only one who can stop it.

“I’m not your husband,” Waymond tells her. “I’m another version of him from another universe. I’m here because we need your help.”

“Very busy today,” Evelyn tells him, “I have no time to help you.”

But when everyone around her suddenly seems to have nothing better to do that to hunt her down and kill her, Evelyn quickly realizes that she doesn’t have a choice in the matter.

Positive Elements

[ Spoilers are contained in this section ] Evelyn’s husband Waymond (all versions of him, actually) shows an unrelenting positivity that is unmatched by any other character in the film. Though it initially appears that Waymond is simply another rehash of the happy-go-lucky dumb husband trope that pervades many movies and TV shows, we learn the real reason for his joy: he uses it as a way to survive.

The movie introduces us to a nihilistic argument: Nothing matters, so what’s the point of living? Waymond’s contagious joy is used to fight against this idea. And throughout the movie, Evelyn discovers that his contentment in all circumstances is often more effective at dealing with their problems than her style of battening down the hatches and preparing the cannons. To be clear, he doesn’t ignore the problems—he just slaps a pair of googly eyes on them and then gets to work.

His optimism eventually seeps into Evelyn, and we see her use his advice to triumph over many of her adversaries. Instead of her simple-yet-ineffective method of “punch first, ask questions later,” she overcomes her opponents through reminding them that there are things they still enjoy even in a universe where nothing seems to matter—just as Waymond had done for her. Of course, a couple of these reminders are unsavory, but others remind us of happy memories in life, such as Evelyn spraying a man with the perfume his wife wore when she was alive.

And though Evelyn’s daughter Joy deeply desires to fall into a pit of annihilation and despair, Evelyn refuses to allow her to do so. Even as Joy fights against her, Evelyn holds and protects her daughter from becoming consumed by depression. Evelyn doesn’t deny either of their flaws or miscommunications, but she instead reminds Joy that she loves her and would much rather live together with their flaws than exist in a world without her.

There are also elements throughout the film which talk about the importance of marriage. Waymond introduces divorce papers to Evelyn early on in the film, yes, but it is clear that neither of them actually want it to come to that: Waymond mournfully looks on toward a happy elderly couple, one of whom gently kisses the other on the cheek. Waymond and Evelyn both believe that it is wrong to divorce, and they reference the sacred vows they made to one another. In fact, Waymond states that he’s only brought the papers because another friend told him that having the papers in front of them might restore their marriage by making the prospect of divorce seem more real—and force them to have difficult, but important, conversations.

Though the effectiveness of that strategy seems dubious, it’s apparent that everything Waymond is doing is an effort to restore a marriage that has fallen from unconditional love to little more than resigned dependence. But as Evelyn jumps from a universe with Waymond to a universe without him—a universe where she’s rich and successful— she rejects that more glamorous life to spend a harder, tax-and-laundry-filled existence with him.

Spiritual Elements

In addition to a few minor spiritual quips (listed below), a major part of Everything Everywhere All at Once is a nihilistic discussion on existence. Because the characters have the ability to obtain any skill, life and circumstance they desire by jumping from universe to universe, the Jobu Tupaki asserts that nothing truly matters. She has seen everything and has constructed an “everything bagel,” with literally everything on it, from emotions to report cards to sesame seeds. That bagel taught her that existence itself is futile and pointless—where people have merely a few moments of clarity amid a sea of chaos.

Believe it or not, that’s actually a biblical principle—at least, part of one. The author of Ecclesiastes wrote the same thing: “ Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun ” ( Eccles. 1:2-3 )? Whether it’s the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, wisdom or status, everything is ultimately meaningless—like trying to grab vapor in the wind. We all die, we are forgotten and the world moves on without us. Life is chaotic and out of our control.

But, unlike Joy, the author doesn’t end it on that depressing note. Instead, he points us to the purpose of life at the end of the book: “ The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man ” ( Eccles. 12:13 , cf. John 15:1-11 ). In one sense, the Jobu Tupaki is correct—life is merely a vapor in the wind, here today and gone tomorrow, so what’s the point? But the flaw in the Jobu Tupaki’s philosophy is in not acknowledging an eternal God who does not pass away and can therefore be a firm foundation.

Jokes are made about the clothes worn by Becky, Joy’s girlfriend—with Becky being told they have a “hot Mormon look.” A man says, “God rest her soul.” Evelyn discusses souls. A woman sings Franz Schubert’s “Ellens dritter Gesang” (more commonly nicknamed “Ave Maria”). Waymond briefly mentions a friend from church. Waymond says he’s happy “chance” allowed him and Evelyn to spend some time together.

Sexual Content

Throughout the film, Evelyn and Waymond discuss getting a divorce. At one point, we see Evelyn sign the divorce papers. We briefly see Evelyn’s face as she’s apparently having sex in a split-second scene, though nothing else is shown. Evelyn causes two people to get married, and she spanks another man and uses bondage equipment on him.

An IRS auditor named Deirdre Beaubeirdra has three trophies of sex toys on her desk for being auditor of the month. A police officer’s baton is turned into a sex toy resembling male genitalia (which later, magically, transforms into two such toys), and the Jobu Tupaki beats him to death with them. An office has a hidden room filled with sex toys.

In the movie’s lore, doing something weird will help connect you to another universe’s version of yourself, allowing you to access that version of you’s abilities—as we explain in Other Negative Elements below. As such, in one fight scene, a man attempts to sit on a sex toy to regain his fighting powers Another man who isn’t wearing pants succeeds in sitting on the toy (his genitals are censored), and the other man sticks another object up his rear. Both men fight Evelyn with the items still stuck in their rears, and Evelyn pulls them out to rid them of their powers.

Joy is a lesbian and is dating another girl named Becky. In one universe, Evelyn is a lesbian, and we see her and her partner engage in affectionate and even slightly sensual activity (though nothing critical is shown, and it’s done for comic effect). Evelyn and Waymond kiss. Joy and Becky kiss on a couple of occasions. An elderly couple kisses. In a universe where humans have hot dogs for fingers, people put their fingers in one another’s mouths, causing ketchup and mustard to shoot out.

Violent Content

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a very odd movie with an oddly fitting title. It is important for the reader to remember that because this film deals with a multiverse, characters who are hurt or die in one may still be alive in another.

Evelyn is killed by a pipe to the head. Evelyn is also killed after overloading her brain from jumping to too many universes. She punches, kicks and grapples with many people. At one point, she uses a riot shield as a weapon against a group of people. Evelyn stabs someone with a shard of glass. She also smashes a window with a baseball bat.

Waymond’s neck is snapped, and another version of Waymond also dies. He fights a group of security officers with a fanny pack, knocking them all out, and he fights Deirdre. Waymond slaps Evelyn. Waymond is tased.

Dierdre fights Evelyn and Waymond, and at one point, she slams herself into a wall headfirst. She also staples a piece of paper to her head.

Someone tells Evelyn to kill someone else with a box cutter before they are possessed by the Jobu Tupaki. The Jobu Tupaki stabs itself, and it uses ketchup to pretend it was shot by a gun. The Jobu Tupaki attempts to ends its existence. A car crashes. A group of police officers are killed in a variety of ways—one is shot to death, one pops into a spray of confetti and one is beaten to death with sex toys. A split-second scene shows a bus driver about to be hit in a head-on collision.

Crude or Profane Language

The f-word is used eight times, and the s-word is used 15 times. “B–ch,” “d–n” and “p-ss” are occasionally heard as well. God’s name is misused nearly 15 times.

Alpha Waymond calls Evelyn the “worst” version of Evelyn.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Joy and Becky are seen in a bar. Joy asks if Evelyn is drunk. The Jobu Tupaki smokes a cigarette, and she uses the barrel of a gun like a vape.

Evelyn drinks a beer. Evelyn tries vaping. Waymond smokes a cigarette.

Other Negative Elements

Evelyn throws up due to morning sickness, and she also throws up from jumping to too many universes. A version of Evelyn is seen in a baby bonnet and covered in blood. One universe shows humans evolved from monkeys. A woman swings a dog on its leash to use as a weapon to attack Evelyn. Evelyn wets herself.

The characters are able to instantly learn how to perform skills that other versions of themselves have mastered by jumping to their universe and obtaining that version’s memories. However, in order to jump universes, characters must first do a strange, often unpleasant action, all of which are listed below.

Waymond eats lip balm, and he chews gum stuck under a table. Waymond also gives himself paper cuts between his fingers. Evelyn must convincingly tell Deirdre that she loves her, she forces her father to eat his own snot and she snorts a fly. Deirdre staples a paper to her forehead.

A couple of scenes contain bright flashing lights, creating a strobe light effect that may be difficult for some to be able to watch or may be concerning for those who suffer from photosensitive epilepsy.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is perhaps the strangest movie you’ll see all year. It’s surely the only movie I’ve ever seen where the protagonist is occasionally a piñata or a rock with googly eyes and sometimes sports hot dogs for fingers. And I definitely never expected a movie with those elements to be about, at its root, philosophical questions on the nature of existence.

As Evelyn travels from universe to universe, she finds herself experiencing all of the directions her life could have gone had she taken a different path—if she never married her husband Waymond or had learned martial arts, for example. And in every instance, she discovers that those versions of her have, on the surface, much better lives than she does (yes, even the Evelyn who has hot dogs for fingers).

It’s enough to make Evelyn want to just abandon her past life and go live in one of those other universes. The quality of her life would dramatically increase, it would seem. If you can be anything, anywhere, why would you ever stay in a universe that contains not only all of your failures and flaws, but also the failures and flaws of others? And not only that, but if there are infinite universes and infinite possibilities, does anything really matter in the end—or is it all, as Jobu Tupaki tells us, a meaningless mess of chaos with only a few seconds of occasional clarity?

They’re questions Evelyn grapples with, often swinging one way and another. And as she thinks about how to answer them, she reminds us of the value of marriage and family as she goes, continuously fighting for her father, husband and daughter through her journey. And through all the punches thrown and kicks, well, kicked, we realize that just because a universe is full of pain and hardship doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not a life worth living.

Of course, to get to that conclusion, Evelyn must also dive into a movie more loaded with more unsavory content than an everything bagel. This multiverse is filled with various sexual themes and gags of both the homosexual and heterosexual variety, harsh swear words and plenty of violent content. In addition, the sheer strangeness factor of the movie may be a bit too strange for some, and a couple scenes with bright flashing lights may be hard for some to sit through.

In one of Evelyn’s universes, this movie is able to tell all those positive messages without the addition of these content concerns. Unfortunately, we aren’t in the right one.

Kennedy Unthank

Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He doesn’t think the ending of Lost was “that bad.”

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'Pride and Prejudice' (2005)

To adapt Jane Austen 's quintessential romantic novel and not make it a gorgeous depiction of love would be a harder task than the inverse; but Joe Wright nevertheless went above and beyond with his Pride and Prejudice , about a spirited woman and a proud man above her class who begin to fall hopelessly in love.

The elegant visuals, polished directing, and outstanding performances all contribute to making this one of the best romance films of the 21st century ; but the main star is the connection between the two main characters and the script's mature exploration of what can prevent love from being limitless.

'Everything Everywhere All At Once' (2022)

In the Daniels ' Everything Everywhere All At Once , a middle-aged Chinese woman is swept up into a multiverse-hopping adventure where she becomes reality's only hope for salvation. This Oscar-winning film is many things: A sci-fi epic, a hilariously absurd action comedy, and arguably also a beautiful tale of romance in the face of existential dread.

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Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan are terrific in their roles, and the dynamic between their characters is one of the movie's greatest strengths. The story shows that even when nothing seems to make sense, love makes all the chaos worth it.

'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' (2004)

Leave it to screenwriter Charlie Kaufman to craft a deep and incredibly hard-hitting meditation on the most crucial aspects of the human condition. Michel Gondry 's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , one of Kaufman's best works, is a unique kind of sci-fi romance about a couple undergoing a procedure to have each other erased from their memories.

The film makes genius and touching use of its creative concept, portraying the most painful parts of love with bittersweet honesty, but never an ounce of cynicism. In one of the best closing lines in film history , Eternal Sunshine poses that accepting the possibility of heartbreak is much preferable than not loving at all.

'The Apartment' (1960)

Billy Wilder was undeniably one of the best auteurs of Hollywood's Golden Age , capable of exploring any genre with equal success. The Apartment is arguably his best rom-com, about an insurance clerk who tries to climb the corporate ladder by letting his superiors use his apartment for their love affairs, while accidentally finding love in the process himself.

The movie is funny, profoundly humanistic, and—above all—beautifully romantic. In a time when most romantic movies idealized the idea of love, Wilder dared to show it as it really is: messy and complicated, but also the best tool to make sense of an equally chaotic world.

'Brokeback Mountain' (2005)

Ang Lee 's Brokeback Mountain is a devastatingly sad romantic film about longing and loss, where a pair of shepherds develop a relationship that's threatened when they both get married to their respective girlfriends.

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Though it's perhaps too heartbreaking to watch twice, a single watch is enough to appreciate why Lee's movie is considered one of the best romantic dramas of the 21st century. It shows a level of love and adoration not often seen in movies, and how repressing love can only result in a shockwave of heartbreak for everyone around.

'When Harry Met Sally' (1989)

In Rob Reiner 's classic rom-com When Harry Met Sally , two friends who have known each other for years constantly try and fail to find love, growing ever-closer with each attempt, but fearing that romance might ruin their friendship.

This is one of those comedies that just keep getting better with age , with a pair of charming lead performances and a hilarious sense of humor. Perhaps its biggest strength, however, is its surprisingly nuanced portrayal of love as a messy and imperfect, but ultimately life-affirming thing, especially when the person you happen to fall in love with is your best friend.

'Up' (2009)

The fact that Up is able to pack in one of animation's most touching love stories in just its opening few minutes speaks volumes about Pete Docter 's quality as a writer-director. What follows is the sweet and exciting story of 78-year-old Carl, who uses balloons to transport his house to Paradise Falls to fulfill his deceased wife Ellie's biggest dream.

Up might be a movie aimed at children, but its depiction of love as an unstoppable force that lives on even after one's partner's passing, capable of literally making a housefly, is surprisingly mature and profound. It's pretty much impossible to follow Carl and Ellie's story without shedding a few tears.

The 'Before' Trilogy

Known for his honest and naturalistic approach to stories, Richard Linklater made in his acclaimed Before Trilogy three of the best romantic films in recent memory. Over the course of eighteen years, they chronicle the ups and downs of the relationship between Jesse and Céline, who meet on a train to Vienna.

Star Ethan Hawke put it best : Before Sunrise is about "what might be," Before Sunset is about "what should be," and Before Midnight is about "what is." Watching Jesse and Céline's relationship grow and mature is profoundly inspiring, and a moving display of how love changes as you grow up.

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10 Most Realistic and Mature Depictions of Love in Romance Movies

Ke Huy Quan-Led Action Movie 'With Love' Adds 'Into the Badlands' Star Daniel Wu

Ariana DeBose will also star in the upcoming film produced by 'The Fall Guy' duo Kelly McCormick and David Leitch.

The Big Picture

Daniel Wu has joined the cast of With Love opposite Ke Huy Quan.
Ke Huy Quan continues his trajectory as an action star following a successful career boost after Everything Everywhere All At Once .
With Love producer David Leitch praises Quan's action chops, promising next-level character development in the 2025 film.

There's still plenty of mystery surrounding With Love , the upcoming movie that will see the return of Ke Huy Quan to the big screen after his acclaimed performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once . But according to Deadline , it's been confirmed that Daniel Wu has joined the cast of the film. However, details about his character have not been disclosed at the moment. Wu joins the project that is set to be Jonathan Esubio 's directorial debut after the filmmaker has worked as a veteran stunt and fight coordinator for years.

The upcoming movie will serve as a reunion for Wu and Ke Huy Quan, who were recently seen in American Born Chinese together. The Disney+ television series followed a young boy finding himself involved in a legendary conflict between ancient entities. Wu was recently seen in Reminiscence , the science fiction thriller that told the story of Nick Bannister ( Hugh Jackman ) and how he uses a machine that can dive deep into other people's memories to find out what happened to his lost love. Wu also had a recurring role in the fourth season of Westworld .

When it comes to the other major star of With Love , Ke Huy Quan has been very careful with planning his next steps after stepping into the spotlight following the wildly successful Everything Everywhere All At Once . Given his trademark enthusiasm, it seems like Quan is very excited about the screenplay for With Love written by Luke Passmore , Josh Stoddard, and Matthew Murray . Quan also recently voiced Han in Kung Fu Panda 4 , the latest sequel in the franchise that follows Po ( Jack Black ) and his journey as the Dragon Warrior. While little else is known about With Love at the moment, we do know that West Side Story and Wish star Ariana DeBose is also set to play a major role.

Ke Huy Quan: The Action Star

By joining the cast of With Love , Daniel Wu has become a part of an explosive adventure that will be seen by audiences in less than a year. The actor will share the screen with Ke Huy Quan, who is more than ready to continue his trajectory as an action star. During a recent interview with Collider's Steve Weintraub , at SXSW , With Love producer David Leitch stated the following regarding Ke Huy Quan as a rising action star:

"What was a lot of discovery for us, he has some action chops because he'd worked with Corey Yuen's team for a while in the past. He's done quite a bit of fight action, obviously even before Everything Everywhere All at Once . It was really about like, there was an assessment phase with the guys, and they were all just like, "Oh my God, this is amazing." The aptitude's already here, so let's take it to the next level. I think it was just sort of like tweaking him to the next level and really finding the character in the action. That's what they were unpacking."

With Love premieres in theaters in the United States on February 7, 2025. Stay tuned at Collider for further updates. You can watch Quan in Everything Everywhere All At Once on Netflix.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

A middle-aged Chinese immigrant is swept up into an insane adventure in which she alone can save existence by exploring other universes and connecting with the lives she could have led.

Watch on Netflix

IMAGES

"Everything Everywhere All at Once" (2022) Movie Review
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) Review
Everything Everywhere All at Once Review: see this film immediately
Everything Everywhere All at Once Is the Best Multiverse Movie Ever
Everything Everywhere All at Once review
'Everything, Everywhere All at Once' Movie Review: Michelle Yeoh's

COMMENTS

Everything Everywhere All at Once movie review (2022)
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. Advertisement.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Audience Reviews for Everything Everywhere All at Once Jun 13, 2022 A wildly ambitious and ambitiously weird movie, this takes the multiverse concept to new heights in the strangest way.
'Everything Everywhere All at Once' Review: It's Messy, and Glorious
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 ...
'Everything Everywhere All at Once' review: A multiverse of roads not
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 ...
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Everything Everywhere All At Once is a spectacle in the purest sense of the word. A sensory overload, especially in IMAX, the movie is a science fiction, multi-verse spanning love letter to family.
Everything Everywhere All at Once Perfects Optimistic Nihilism
Everything Everywhere All at Once. Perfects Optimistic Nihilism. Equal parts soul-searching and sci-fi, the movie takes the idea of the multiverse to emotional and logical extremes. Courtesy of ...
Everything Everywhere All at Once review: Michelle Yeoh surfs the
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. A movie that's ...
Everything Everywhere All at Once Review
Posted: Mar 12, 2022 9:55 am. 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 ...
'Everything Everywhere All at Once' Review: Chaos Reigns
There are enough ideas in "Everything Everywhere All at Once" to fuel a dozen movies, or else a full-blown TV series, but the Daniels have shoehorned it all into a bombastic, emotionally ...
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
'Everything Everywhere All at Once' (2022) Opening thoughts: Other than wanting to see as many 2022 films as possible and that it scored big at the Oscars, my main reason for watching 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' was the concept. Absolutely loved how ambitious and original it was, have not heard or seen anything like it, and have always ...
Movie Review: A24's Everything Everywhere All at Once
Vulture's Alison Willmore reviews the new A24 sci-fi family drama Everything Everywhere All at Once, starring Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, and James Hong, and directed by Daniels.
Everything Everywhere All At Once review: charming, sprawling, and
Everything Everywhere All At Once is a sci-fi martial arts comedy from Swiss Army Man directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert starring Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Ke Huy Quan.
'Everything Everywhere All at Once' review: Michelle Yeoh ...
Strange, surreal and unexpectedly sentimental, "Everything Everywhere All at Once" is genuinely and wildly original - the kung fu/science fiction/metaphysical action comedy that you didn't ...
Everything Everywhere All at Once review
The multiverse-themed Everything Everywhere All at Once has indeed been giving Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (which cost eight times as much) a run for its money, both financially and ...
Everything Everywhere All At Once Review
Everything Everywhere All At Once Review. Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is trying to complete her tax audit, throw a Chinese New Year party to impress her father (James Hong), navigate a possible divorce ...
"Everything Everywhere All at Once," Reviewed: There's No There There
Richard Brody reviews the movie "Everything Everywhere All at Once," a vapor puff of corporatized fantasy directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert and starring Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee ...
Everything Everywhere All at Once review
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 ...
'Everything Everywhere All at Once' review: Michelle Yeoh on the go
Stephanie Hsu, left, Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh and James Hong in the 2022 sci-fi thriller "Everything Everywhere All at Once.". A messy tax audit of her family-run laundromat isn't the only ...
'Everything Everywhere All at Once' Review
March 11, 2022 7:30pm. 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' Courtesy of SXSW. In 2016's Swiss Army Man, gonzo auteur duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert made an aggressive bid for cult ...
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Everything Everywhere All at Once: Directed by Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert. With Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong. A middle-aged Chinese immigrant is swept up into an insane adventure in which she alone can save existence by exploring other universes and connecting with the lives she could have led.
Everything Everywhere All at Once Movie Review
Parents need to know that Everything Everywhere All at Once is a trippy sci-fi/fantasy martial arts adventure from the directors of the dark comedy Swiss Army Man. It centers on a middle-aged laundromat owner named Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), who discovers she must help save the multiverse during a routine trip to file her business taxes. Expect ...
'Everything Everywhere All at Once' Review
Mar 18, 2022. Everything Everywhere All at Once is simultaneously supremely silly and profoundly moving, a film that hides its earnestness under multiple layers of jokes without dipping into deadening ironic detachment. Plus: there's kung fu and talking rocks and an everything bagel that really has everything and looks a little like a black hole.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Everything Everywhere All at Once is a 2022 American absurdist comedy-drama film written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who produced it with Anthony and Joe Russo and Jonathan Wang.The film incorporates elements from several genres and film media, including surreal comedy, science fiction, fantasy, martial arts films, immigrant narrative, and animation.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Everything Everywhere All at Once is a very odd movie with an oddly fitting title. It is important for the reader to remember that because this film deals with a multiverse, characters who are hurt or die in one may still be alive in another. Evelyn is killed by a pipe to the head.
#EverythingEverywhereAllAtOnce Movie Review (5/5): #A24 is ...
"Everything Everywhere All At Once" is the secon..." #EverythingEverywhereAllAtOnce Movie Review (5/5): #A24 is on a real roll this year. "Everything Everywhere All At Once" is the secon... | Instagram
Keynote: Daniels: How We Pulled Off Everything Everywhere All at Once
IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. Find ratings and reviews for the newest movie and TV shows. Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers.
Netflixers Episode 4 "Everything Everywhere All At Once"
Netflixers is a show produced by Claire Hoshi, and it discusses the most recent movie reviews from Netflix(mainly released in 2023). In this episode, we will be reviewing the movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once!! ***This is a special version of the show since it is not released on Netflix.***
10 Most Realistic and Mature Depictions of Love in Romance Movies
Blue Is the Warmest Colour. is one of the most emotionally stirring romantic films of recent years. In this 3-hour-long coming-of-age, a young woman's life is changed when she meets a free ...
10 Best James Hong Movies, Ranked
Directed by Mark Osborne & John Stevenson. One of the best martial arts films in the history of movies exists as an animated 3D film. DreamWorks Animation's Kung Fu Panda is an incredible ...
Ke Huy Quan Action Movie 'With Love' Adds 'Into the ...
Daniel Wu has joined the cast of With Love opposite Ke Huy Quan.; Ke Huy Quan continues his trajectory as an action star following a successful career boost after Everything Everywhere All At Once ...

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