Everything Everywhere All at Once

Everything Everywhere All at Once” is your standard multiverse martial arts movie about filing your taxes and midlife regret in which googly eyes, ...

There’s not a weak link in the cast but it’s a special joy to see — and hear — Quan again. As boundless as “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is, it’s a fairly claustrophobic movie — the multiverses mostly collide in Evelyn’s present reality. It’s a proxy version of the daughter that’s causing all the trouble in the various universes. Another is a wild riff on “Ratatouille,” only, thanks to Evelyn’s mispronunciation, it’s with a racoon for a tiny chef. A more capable version of Waymond hailing from another dimension (the “alpha verse”) takes her aside to warn of a new evil that is tearing through the many levels of existence that, he explains, were all created by each decision Evelyn has ever made. “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” though, is more ambitious.

In Slate's annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2022, Bilge Ebiri, Beatrice Loayza, and David Sims—about the year in ...

And while I’ve never much bought into the “Consumer Reports” school of film criticism, I do get a little thrill when I hear from someone that my review of Athena or Murina or But I was told streaming and video on demand was going to open up the world of cinema to everybody! That this was the great democratization of the medium! I know that the theme of immigration and what-might-have-beens resonated with a lot of people, myself included, but you certainly don’t need to have had that experience to appreciate the film. A Mubi release, Lingui played maybe three full weeks at Film Forum, and I find it hard to imagine it got much of a chance anywhere else around the country. My life seems to be divided between bigger movies that I’m expected to write about, and smaller movies that I want to write about. (One of their awards-season releases, The Whale, is currently doing extremely well in limited release, despite wildly mixed reviews—and that’s not exactly a movie that screams box-office slam dunk.) I do know that keeping EEAAO in theaters definitely helped, actually prompting people who might have otherwise waited a couple of weeks for it to hit streaming to actually go and enjoy it on the big screen in the presence of (boo, hiss) other humans. (Netflix would surely claim some obscure bajillion-hours-watched metric to tell me that The Gray Man is a success, but I’ve yet to meet a non-critic who remembers seeing that movie.) They’ve got you in the palms of their hands, even as they throw multiverse after multiverse at you, intercutting wildly between timelines and genres and different iterations of the characters and letting their movie go a little crazy. And it was gratifying to see that audiences were willing to follow them, thus proving the not-so-old-or-for-that-matter-popular adage that you can confuse audiences so long as you do it with confidence and formal dexterity. [I was profiling Ke Huy Quan](https://www.vulture.com/article/ke-huy-quan-everything-everywhere-all-at-once-profile.html) for New York magazine—I had no idea if it would be a hit. [Movie Club](https://slate.com/tag/movie-club-2022), film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2022, Bilge Ebiri, Beatrice Loayza, and David Sims—about the year in cinema.