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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marya E. Gates

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

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Film credits.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Rated R for some violence, sexual material and language.

139 minutes

Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang

Stephanie Hsu as Joy Wang / Jobu Tupaki

James Hong as Gong Gong

Jonathan Ke Quan as Waymond Wang

Jamie Lee Curtis as Deirdre Beaubeirdra

Anthony Molinari as Police - Confetti

Jenny Slate as Big Nose

Andy Le as Alpha Jumper - Bigger Trophy

Brian Le as Alpha Jumper - Trophy

Daniel Scheinert as District Manager

Harry Shum Jr. as Chad

Boon Pin Koh as Maternity Doctor

• Daniel Scheinert

Cinematographer

• Larkin Seiple
• Paul Rogers

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

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

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By A.O. Scott

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Eric Ravenscraft

Everything Everywhere All at Once Perfects Optimistic Nihilism

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.

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy

Sam Kieldsen

Amy Paturel

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–

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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

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.

“Everything Everywhere” does everything but buck your seats and spritz you with water, although I’m pretty sure the Daniels would be thrilled for the film to play in 4DX theaters that do just that. Their goal is evidently to deliver an unparalleled sensory-overload experience, as this busy, multilingual film throttles us for the better part of two hours (much of it handled in Chinglish, with Yeoh’s immigrant character switching among English, Cantonese and Mandarin mid-sentence) before bringing it all into a poignant group hug.

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.”

She tries it for the first time in the middle of the Wang family’s meeting with Deirdre, a surly IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis) who looks hilariously frumpy in a bowl cut and a mustard-colored turtleneck. For Evelyn, who only half-understands English, this audit is root-canal uncomfortable, and the Daniels ensure that it’s every bit as unpleasant for us, made even bumpier by her maiden verse-jump to a nearby janitor’s closet, where split screens and blurry overlay effects convey how it feels for Evelyn to be multitasking conversations in two places at once.

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!)

It’s hard to believe half the stuff they’ve gotten away with here — from a fanny-pack fight sequence to an irreverent bit in which security guards use butt plugs as multiverse portals — even if the sum falls far short of coherent. True to their brand, the Daniels have made a film that reflects their off-the-wall sense of humor (Scheinert’s second feature, “The Death of Dick Long,” focused on a man who hooked up with a horse), blasting us with electric-shock paddles, rather than spoon-feeding anything for easy comprehension. These two trust their audience enough that they never would have given Gwyneth Paltrow separate haircuts. But maybe they should’ve slowed down just a bit to wonder if we could follow. “Everything Everywhere” is ultimately too much of a good thing, a novel idea driven to the point of exhaustion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, a movie with infinite Michelle Yeohs

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

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

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

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

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

Read: Pop culture is having a metaphysical moment

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

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

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

Related Podcast

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

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, 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

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…

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.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

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 (29)
• Kids say (61)

Based on 29 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

Did we miss something on diversity?

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

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Being John Malkovich

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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

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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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.

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Release date : Friday, March 25 Venue : SXSW Film Festival (Opening Night) Cast : Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tallie Medel, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr. Director-screenwriters : Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert

The extensive martial arts action calls to mind the Jet Li multiverse vehicle, The One , which already felt like a generic imitator of The Matrix . Everything Everywhere is clever and creative enough to stand on its own, but the lack of restraint dulls any poignancy in the underlying thread of a fraught mother learning to listen to her family’s needs, making it ultimately seem like hollow flashiness. The story’s intimate angle gets virtually smothered.

Nevertheless, this is sure to be a rowdy opening-night entry at the SXSW Film Festival, and the A24 release (produced by the Russo Brothers) does have a winning card in the game lead performance of Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, the frazzled Chinese American owner of a laundromat drowning in documentation for an IRS audit.

Evelyn is so busy tallying receipts and preparing for the birthday party of her elderly father (James Hong) that her mild-mannered husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) can’t get a word in to discuss divorce. And their daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) rocks the boat by insisting on bringing her girlfriend Becky (Tallie Medel) to the celebration. Peevish about Joy’s decision to drop out of college, Evelyn can barely acknowledge her daughter’s sexuality, instead merely telling her she’s getting fat.

On their way to a meeting with hard-bitten IRS case worker Deirdre Beaubeirdra (an amusingly de-glammed Jamie Lee Curtis ), Waymond slaps a headset on Evelyn and informs her that the fate of every single world within an infinite multiverse is at stake and only she can save them. Despite the disorienting effect of seeing her whole life play out in fast-motion, Evelyn thinks Waymond is talking nonsense until she witnesses him taking down the entire IRS security staff with a fanny pack.

Having gotten her attention, he explains that a malevolent, all-seeing agent of anarchy named Jobu Tupaki is threatening destruction, so Evelyn must master the art of “verse-jumping” in order to correct the mistakes of the past and restore balance.

Almost everyone from her mundane reality resurfaces elsewhere in the multiverse, usually as an adversary, right down to Deirdre in demented banshee mode and a rude laundromat customer (Jenny Slate) whose lap dog gets repurposed as a weapon. The greatest conflict for Evelyn comes with the discovery that Jobu Tupaki is actually someone very close to her, whose formidable strength is perhaps fed by a simple yearning to be understood across the generational divide.

With invaluable assists from production designer Jason Kisvarday and costumer Shirley Kurata, Evelyn sees herself as a glamorous Hong Kong movie star attending a premiere, a master chef with virtuoso knife skills, a Beijing Opera star, a kung fu disciple, a piñata and even a sentient rock in a desert landscape. An alphaverse version of Waymond, meanwhile, is in a control RV with other alpha officers, monitoring the action and providing verse-jumping cues.

Everything is a random rearrangement of particles to form a different reality, described by Jobu Tupaki as a bagel with all the toppings, which she controls. In one dimension, everyone has wieners for fingers; in another, police truncheons turn into floppy dildos; then there are the folks with … spirit raccoons perched on their heads? It’s like Tarsem Singh’s The Cell with a sense of humor, albeit an often juvenile one.

DP Larkin Seiple, editor Paul Rogers and Los Angeles band Son Lux, who composed the eclectic score, deserve credit for keeping pace with the film’s unstinting commitment to visceral over-stimulation and its shapeshifting approach to genre.

The same goes for Yeoh, bouncing back and forth from fragile and exhausted to fierce and commanding. She has strong support, in particular, from The Goonies favorite Quan, making a welcome big-screen return, and the delightful Hsu. Fans will also get a kick out of Curtis straddling wild action with deadpan comedy and even an unexpected flicker of romance.

As Evelyn observes her life — literally watching it as a movie in one dimension — and the countless different turns it might have taken, Waymond is revealed to be an unlikely hero, opening her eyes to the virtues of kindness, patience and acceptance as tools to make the universe whole again.

That wisdom should come as a touching resolution after such a sustained visual and sonic onslaught, but that would require more engagement with the characters as people and less as human pinballs. Maybe if you were raised on videogames, you might find the movie’s tireless excesses exhilarating, and you might not mind that almost the entire two-and-a-quarter-hour barrage is cut like a trailer. Or you might just feel pummeled into submission and relieved when it’s over.

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

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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.

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.)

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

By Richard Brody

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The photo caption on this article has been updated.

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By Jessica Winter

By Jennifer Wilson

Screen Rant

20 best everything everywhere all at once quotes.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is at its core a very emotional film with deep themes of acceptance and understanding, as quoted by its characters.

• Moving dialogue in Everything Everywhere All at Once reflects deep themes of emotional connection and existential discovery.
• The best Everything Everywhere All at Once quotes showcase poignant moments that explore love, self-worth, and the human condition.
• The film weaves humor with heartfelt messages, highlighting the importance of kindness and personal growth.

Everything Everywhere All at Once quotes show why the 2022 genre-bending multiverse movie gained acclaim for being layered with deeply emotional messages. The film follows Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yeoh) as she gets a new perspective on the life she has chosen and the family that she must reconnect with. Though the movie is filled with exciting action sequences, the best Everything Everywhere All at Once quotes have become widely shared parts. Whether they're deep insights into the human condition or uplifting messages of compassion, the best Everything Everywhere All at Once quotes are hard to forget.

As one of the most acclaimed films of 2022, winning a swathe of prestigious awards, including Best Picture at the Oscars , Everything Everywhere All at Once is naturally strewn with quotable dialogue. Though the delivery of the lines from the equally-lauded core ensemble is naturally impeccable, the best Everything Everywhere All at Once quotes lose none of their moving power even when they're simply read.

Everything Everywhere All At Once Review: Yeoh Delivers In Imaginative Sci-Fi

20 "i would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.", waymond wang (ke huy quan).

The one that stands out as the most memorable and heartbreaking is when an alternate version of Waymond reunites with Evelyn at her most successful and admits to just wanting a simple life with her.

Ke Huy Quan’s return to movies is one of the most heartwarming aspects of the success of Everywhere All at Once . His performance playing the various versions of Waymond is largely the heart of the movie and provides some of the best Everything Everywhere All at Once quotes. However, the one that stands out as the most memorable and heartbreaking is when an alternate version of Waymond reunites with Evelyn at her most successful and admits to just wanting a simple life with her. The small idea of doing taxes and laundry together makes for a beautiful declaration of love.

19 "We're All Small And Stupid."

Evelyn quan wang (michelle yeoh).

Jobu: "Every New Discovery Is Just A Reminder—" Evelyn: "We're All Small And Stupid."

Bizzare as it may seem, perhaps one of the most emotional scenes in Everything Everywhere All at Once stars only rocks. When Evelyn and Joy/Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu) come to one of the many universes where life never formed, they sit as rocks, overlooking a peaceful landscape, and discuss the meaning of existence.

At this point, so much has happened to Evelyn that the weight of the multiverse is beginning to weigh down on her, just as it does on Jobu Tupaki with every passing moment. The two simultaneously reach an ephiphany about their place - or lack of - in the wider multiverse, but that this insignificance is actually a blessing. While this is one of the saddest quotes from Everything Everywhere All at Once , it's also one of the most thought-provoking and relatable.

18 "I Got Bored One Day And Put Everything On A Bagel."

Jobu tupaki (stephanie hsu).

The everything bagel in Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of many brilliant concepts in directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's thought-provoking movie. It is also another great example of how Everything Everywhere is able to throw out such seemingly silly ideas only to explore them in thoughtful ways.

Jobu Tupaki creates this destructive force seemingly on a whim to destroy the multiverse. However, the more the movie reveals about Jobu, the more tragic this line becomes. She was not bored and decided to destroy everything, but rather she was alone and wanted to no longer exist.

17 "She's Seen Too Much!"

Raccacoonie.

One of the joys of the movie is how it can introduce such an outrageous idea as a seemingly throwaway joke only to bring it back and double down on it again and again. At one point, Evelyn misremembers the Pixar movie Ratatouille and reimagines it as a story of a raccoon chef named Raccacoonie.

The joke only gets better when Evelyn finds herself in one of Everything Everywhere All at Once ’s alternate universes where she is a chef whose main rival is a chef being controlled by a raccoon. The moment she discovers the raccoon who immediately attempts to silence Evelyn is one of the funniest quotes from Everything Everywhere All at Once, albeit one that only really works in context.

Everything Everywhere All At Once's Real Meaning Explained

16 "just be a rock.".

The rock scene in Everything Everywhere All at Once is not just a visually interesting and conceptually funny scene, but also has some very poignant aspects hidden behind the silliness. When Evelyn and Joy find themselves in this reality, Evelyn comments on how peaceful it is in the universe where the only thing they can do is exist as rocks.

When she then tries to apologize to Joy, Joy stops her and tells her to simply “ be a rock .” It is a relatable idea that cutting themselves off from problems and emotions can sometimes be easier for people, but just as a rock is strong and durable . However, it is also cold and unmoving, something Evelyn realizes is not the way to be.

15 "Joy? Why Are You Dressed All Stupid?"

Jobu Tupaki is a terrific villain for this Everything Everywhere All at Once as she is appropriately formidable and intimidating while also being a lot of fun. This is perfectly seen in her introduction scene, which plays in great contrast to how timid Joy has been. The scene also subtly addresses the relationship between Evelyn and her daughter as Evelyn sees the flamboyantly dressed Jobu Tupaki — who is identical to Joy — and immediately insults her look. It is a funny moment of Evelyn's bluntness as a mother which, as Joy suggests, is her unique way of expressing her love.

14 "'Right' Is A Small Box Invented by People Who Are Afraid."

Like all the best movie villains, Jobu Tupaki does not see herself as the villain of the story but rather as someone who is not willing to bend to the rules of lesser people. Even the idea of destroying the universe is not an evil idea in her mind, and the notion of right or wrong is a concept she doesn't even believe in. This deeply considered moral outlook is also the reason Stephanie Hsu's villain is the source of many of the best Everything Everywhere All at Once quotes.

Her insistence in Everything Everywhere All at Once that people determining what is "right" do so as a reaction that comes from fear. Jobu sees herself as someone who is willing to push things further, regardless of who might try to stop her and what they label her as.

13 "I Wasn't Looking For You So I Could Kill You. I Was Just Looking For Someone Who Could See What I See, Feel What I Feel."

Everything Everywhere All at Once has a very imposing villain in Jobu Tupaki, who has lost all sense of morality after experiencing everything in the multiverse all at once. She hunts down variant versions of her mother, all in an attempt to find someone who could share her immense pain. Until she finally comes face to face with the Evelyn whom she searches the multiverse for, Jobu Tupaki seems like a callous and cruel villain with no tangible motivation.

However, when she finds what she's been searching for, it is revealed through this poignant Everything Everywhere All at Once quote that Jobu is driven by a desire for companionship , suddenly becoming a complex and compelling character.

Everything Everywhere All At Once Explained: Ending, Bagel & More

12 "if nothing matters, then all the pain and guilt you feel for making nothing of your life goes away.".

Not only is Jobu Tupaki a more complex character than she initially seems, but her plan to destroy all of existence becomes appealing to Evelyn over the course of Everything Everywhere All at Once . One of the biggest emotions that Evelyn struggles with in the story is the feeling that she has wasted her life. This is only amplified by seeing all the other versions of herself and the things they were able to accomplish.

Jobu manipulates those feelings and shows Evelyn how the pain of her existence can simply end if all of this is wiped out.

Jobu manipulates those feelings and shows Evelyn how the pain of her existence can simply end if all of this is wiped out. This quote from the 2022 movie is not only an idea that is appealing to Evelyn, but gives insight into Jobu's own desires.

11 "I Always Learn Something When I Hang Out With The Elderly. Old People Are Very Wise."

Becky (tallie medel).

Becky Sregor (Tallie Medel) is the girlfriend of Joy, Evelyn's daughter, and does her best to help out the Wang family in any way she can. When given a chance to meet Joy's grandfather (James Hong), she jumps at the chance with the kind of charming positivity that makes her — as Evelyn comes to understand by the end — Joy's version of her husband, Waymond.

She's a caring, patient, and just generally pure soul. As with some of the best aspects of the movie, Becky is a character who is able to bring in moments of levity while also representing a more emotional and touching aspect of the story. This Everything Everywhere All at Once quote perfectly captures both aspects of the character, as it's incredibly poignant, but Tallie Medel's delivery and timing also adds a healthy dash of humor.

10 "The Only Thing I Do Know Is That We Have To Be Kind. Please, Be Kind. Especially When We Don't Know What's Going On."

Waymond is often looked down on by his wife, as Evelyn views him as naive, overly sentimental, and ignorant of the very real struggles the couple face. However, Waymond being so jovial and understanding, even in the face of violence and overwhelming peculiarity, is one of his most endearing features. At no point in the film does the original version of Waymond fully understand the concept of the multiverse, yet he never falters in his resolve to be kind.

His musings on kindness itself throughout the movie are heartfelt and heartbreaking, as it can seem like he is the only one trying in the universe who values kindness. This Everything Everywhere All at Once quote from the original Waymond is especially powerful , as he makes a desperate plea not because he is in control of the situation, but because at a moment where he is confused and alone, he knows that basic kindness is still a necessity.

9 "You Are Not Unlovable. There Is Always Something To Love. Even In A Stupid, Stupid Universe Where We Have Hot Dogs For Fingers, We Get Very Good With Our Feet."

The best Everything Everywhere All at Once quotes both remind the audience of life-affirming universal truths and highlight just how weird the movie can be. At the end of Everything Everywhere All At Once , upon choosing kindness over violence and hate, Evelyn comes to see her opponents not as enemies, but as broken people in need of finding their purpose. She illustrates that with a reference to a far-flung universe in which humans evolved to have hotdogs for fingers.

As Evelyn says this to the largely antagonistic IRS inspector Deidre (Jamie Lee Curtis) and the version of Evelyn in the hotdog fingers universe is in a romantic relationship with the Deidre of that universe, Evelyn saying this shows her progress in embracing Joy's relationship with Becky. It completes one of the movie's most satisfying arcs, turning Deidre into a much more sympathetic figure.

Everything Everywhere All At Once: The 7 Most Intriguing Evelyn Multiverse Variants

8 "the universe is so much bigger than you realize.", alpha waymond (ke huy quan).

Everything Everywhere All at Once dives right into the concept of the multiverse early in the film, as the version of Waymond from the Alpha universe reveals to Evelyn that the reality she knows is only a small fraction of existence as a whole. Over the course of the film, Evelyn learns the daunting truth of the universe but her embracing new ideas that once seemed alien and frightening to her is one of the film's most beautiful themes.

Like her daughter's sexuality or her husband contemplating divorce, Evelyn is confronted by things she'd rather ignore, but the universe stops allowing her to, and she rises to the occasion. While this Everything Everywhere All at Once quote might initially seem like simple exposition, it's also a blunt explanation of one of the core thematic concepts at the center of the thought-provoking movie.

7 "Every Rejection, Every Disappointment Has Led You Here To This Moment."

All these versions of Evelyn connect to the one the audience meets at the beginning of the film.

Michelle Yeoh's Oscar-winning role gives her the unique opportunity to play multiple versions of one character in one of her best roles to date. All these versions of Evelyn connect to the one the audience meets at the beginning of the film, who had embarked on so many failed paths throughout her life that she was beginning to feel like a failure.

Evelyn failed at many things, but each of these failures connected her to a different version of herself who succeeded. Some of the best Everything Everywhere All at Once quotes are reminders that failure is inevitable in life, and it's how people respond to life's challenges that really counts.

6 "It's Okay If You Can't Be Proud Of Me. Because I Finally Am."

Along with the many relationships Evelyn must mend in Everything Everywhere All at Once is the one with her father. However, at the center of that is her larger issue of not feeling her own self-worth. Evelyn's father disowned her when she left home to start a life with Waymond, and she has been left wondering if that was the right decision ever since.

However, at the climax of the movie, Evelyn was able to finally confront the fact that her father could so easily discard his own daughter while also finding pride in herself after so long. It is a cathartic moment that allows Evelyn to move on from one of the most painful aspects of her life and find happiness.

5 "Of All The Places I Could Be, I Just Want To Be Here With You."

Everything Everywhere All at Once is fundamentally a film about family. This is something that Evelyn must learn throughout her journey, eventually learning how to fully express her love for her daughter, despite their many differences. It would have been easy for Evelyn to become distracted by the incredible feats done on this journey, including the traversal of the multiverse itself.

However, one of her most important takeaways from such events was the revelation of just how connected she is to her daughter. This Everything Everywhere All at Once quote reminds the audience that, despite their somewhat rocky relationship, Joy is truly the best thing that happened to Evelyn in any universe.

1 Bizarre Everything Everywhere All At Once Universe Is Subtly Foreshadowed By The Movie's Opening Shot

4 "when i choose to see the good side of things, i'm not being naive. it is strategic and necessary. it's how i learned to survive through everything.".

Ke Huy Quan is another actor who gets to experiment with various versions of the same role in Everything Everywhere All at Once. The original Waymond that the audience meets in the beginning of the movie has a lot of that same childlike spirit that Quan was known for in his child actor roles such as Short Round in the Indiana Jones franchise . However, alternate versions of Waymond show his wise and intellectual side with memorable quotes.

Waymond may not be a fighter in the same way as Evelyn, but he's more effective at fighting than her, and his successful variant reveals his primary weapons to be kindness and optimism. It's an unforgettable Everything Everywhere All at Once and a tear-jerking moment that no doubt helped Ke Yu Quan secure his Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor.

3 "I Don't Know. I Just Talked To Her."

One of the brilliant things about the climax of Everything Everywhere All at Once is how Evelyn faces impending trouble in various universes at the same time. In her own universe, she is at the risk of being arrested for assaulting Deirdre which is not as high-stakes as the universe in which all of existence is being threatened. However, it is in dealing with this dilemma that Waymond shows Evelyn the path to fixing everything.

After seeing Waymond and Deirdre exchange words, Deirdre tells the police not to arrest Evelyn. When Evelyn suggests that is impossible, Waymond explains that he simply talked to her. That simple act of humanity is a sign to Evelyn that even in the most dire of situations, kindness can overcome a lot.

2 "He Told Me About Your Situation."

Deirdre beaubeirdre (jamie lee curtis).

While Waymond's act of simply talking to Deirdre instead of fighting her resolves the issue, it also requires a giant act of sympathy on behalf of Deirdre herself. For much Everything Everywhere All at One , Jamie Lee Curtis's character is seen as a cold and unpleasant antagonist who is out to get Evelyn. However, at this crucial moment, despite the fact that she is the one who has been wronged, she sees Evelyn's struggle and decides to give her a pass.

When Evelyn asks Deirdre what Waymond told her, she explains that he told her about the separation and explains her chaotic reaction to her own husband divorcing her. It is a simple yet satisfying Everything Everywhere All at Once quote that opens up Deirdre as a character, showing a sadness within her while also showing how shared experiences can make people understand and sympathize more.

1 "I'm Learning To Fight Like You."

The best Everything Everywhere All at Once quotes are inspiring and this may be the most inspiring moment of the film. Over her long multiversal travels, Evelyn reassesses each of her closest relationships, including with her husband, Waymond. She ultimately learns that, though she had once looked down on his kindness, she could learn quite a bit from how Waymond goes through life.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is now streaming on Netflix and Prime Video.

Until then, Evelyn had always treated her husband as someone who was naive and unassuming, and whose kindness was his weakness. However, she learns over the course of her journey to appreciate Waymond's tactics, finding that kindness is a far more effective battle technique than hostility.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

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In Everything Everywhere All at Once, a middle-aged laundromat owner (Michelle Yeoh) is distracted from her financial and family issues by a multiversal crisis. With just her husband (Ke Huy Quan) to support her through the confusion, she must contend with her overbearing traditional father (James Hong), a pencil-pushing auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis), and her emotionally-distant daughter (Stephanie Hsu). 

Gateways to Fandom: From Anime to Video Games - Everything, Everywhere, All at Once!

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While the film’s ruthless producer (Emmy winner Hannah Waddingham; Ted Lasso), maneuvers to keep the disappearance of star Tom Ryder (Golden Globe winner Aaron Taylor-Johnson; Bullet Train) a secret from the studio and the media, Colt performs the film’s most outrageous stunts while trying (with limited success) to charm his way back into Jody’s good graces. But as the mystery around the missing star deepens, Colt will find himself ensnared in a sinister, criminal plot that will push him to the edge of a fall more dangerous than any stunt.

Inspired by the hit 1980s TV series, The Fall Guy also stars Winston Duke (Black Panther franchise) and Academy Award nominee Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All at Once).

From a screenplay by Hobbs & Shaw screenwriter Drew Pearce, The Fall Guy is produced by Kelly McCormick (Bullet Train, Nobody, Atomic Blonde) and David Leitch for their company 87North, and by Ryan Gosling and by Guymon Casady (Game of Thrones, Steve Jobs and executive producer of the upcoming series Ripley) for Entertainment 360. The film is executive produced by Drew Pearce, Entertainment 360’s Geoff Shaevitz and the creator of the original Fall Guy television series, Glen A. Larson.

The Fall Guy opens in US theaters on May 3, 2024 and in UK cinemas on May 2, 2024.

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Millie Bobby Brown's new Netflix movie Damsel is a dud – watch these 3 great fantasy movies instead

The best-rated fantasy movies on Netflix now

Millie Bobby Brown's latest Netflix venture Damsel, in which the Stranger Things' actor faces a fiery showdown with a dragon , is proving to be truly in distress after early reviews call it a flop. The new fantasy, adventure film currently has 83 reviews from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, totaling a subpar score of just 59% – the audience, meanwhile, have given it a much more upbeat 73% since it started streaming on March 8. 

From The New York Times' Alissa Wilkinson saying that the new Netflix movie is "evidence that studios still don’t realize that a 'strong female lead' is not enough to make a movie good" to the Times' Kevin Maher writing "that all moments arrive without surprise, simply meeting expectations", there's a resounding consensus among critics that Damsel is not as convincing as it could be.  

Of course, not everyone is entirely in agreement as can be seen from audience ratings, with some praising it for its visually stunning action scenes. But why waste your weekend watching a subpar fantasy movie on the best streaming service when there are plenty more highly rated films to choose from? Here are three fantasy movies most highly rated by critics streaming on Netflix now.     

Everything Everywhere All At Once 

This time last year, Everything Everywhere All At Once surprised everyone by taking home seven Oscars. It was one of the biggest Oscar winners of 2023 and if you haven't yet seen the A24 film then this is your reminder that you absolutely should. This isn't the first time that we've recommended readers watch the multiverse movie  – and I'm sure it won't be the last. It's a bizarre whirlwind of genres, where a stressed out laundromat worker (played by Michelle Yeoh) sets out on an adventure filled with interdimensional travel. An absolute must see. 

Available on Netflix in the US and Australia. For those in the UK, you can rent or buy it on Prime Video, Apple TV Plus and Sky. 

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

If you're a regular TechRadar reader, then you'll know that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is one of the rare movies that we've reviewed and awarded a flawless five stars to – and we're not alone in our high praise, with the movie garnering high scores from critics everywhere. What stands out most about it is the uniquely stunning animation style, which combines computer-generated imagery with hand-drawn 2D elements. It's a landmark film that has sparked a resurgence in creativity throughout the animator space.       

Available on Netflix in the US and UK, and Prime Video or Binge in Australia.  

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Ready Player One 

We don't rate Ready Player One very highly among Steven Spielberg's movies ranked best to worst – and compared to the two films mentioned earlier, it also doesn't have the highest score among critics – but out of all the fantasy movies streaming on Netflix right now, it's one of the most liked. It's easy to see why too. A film about a virtual reality world set in a futuristic society with plenty of pop culture video game references? You're welcome. Top points if you watch it on the Apple Vision Pro this weekend! 

Available on Netflix in the US and Australia. For those in the UK, you can rent or buy it on Prime Video, Apple TV Plus and Sky.

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Amelia became the Senior Editor for Home Entertainment at TechRadar in the UK in April 2023. With a background of more than eight years in tech and finance publishing, she's now leading our coverage to bring you a fresh perspective on everything to do with TV and audio. When she's not tinkering with the latest gadgets and gizmos in the ever-evolving world of home entertainment, you’ll find her watching movies, taking pictures and travelling.

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