Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, 2022) Michelle Yeoh; An aging Chinese immigrant is swept up in an insane adventure, where she alone can save the world by exploring other universes connecting with the lives she could have led.
Technically brilliant. I thought the 'deep and meaningful' bit at the end was somewhat sentimental.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 95% based on 344 reviews, with an average rating of 8.6/10. The website's consensus reads: "Led by an outstanding Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once lives up to its title with an expertly calibrated assault on the senses." On August 26, 2022, Rotten Tomatoes users voted Everything Everywhere All At Once as "A24's Best Film of All Time" in their A24 Showdown. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 81 out of 100, based on 54 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by PostTrak gave it an 89% positive score, with 77% saying that they would definitely recommend it.
David Ehrlich of IndieWire called the film an "orgiastic work of slaphappy genius", praising the direction and performances, particularly Yeoh's. The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney called it a "frenetically plotted serve of stoner heaven [that] is insanely imaginative and often a lot of fun", complimenting the cast and score but found the handling of the story's underlying theme underwhelming. In her review for RogerEbert.com, Marya E. Gates lauded Yeoh's performance, writing: "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." Charles Bramesco, writing for The Guardian, praised the Daniels for constructing a "large, elaborate, polished and detailed expression of a vision". Amy Nicholson of The Wall Street Journal wrote: "Over its nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time, the movie's ambitions double, and double again, as though it's a petri dish teeming with Mr. Kwan and Mr. Scheinert's wildest ideas."
In her review for Vanity Fair, Maureen Ryan highlighted Yeoh's performance, writing: "Yeoh imbues Evelyn with moving shades of melancholy, regret, resolve and growing curiosity" and adding that she "makes her embrace of lead-character energy positively gripping". Adam Nayman of The Ringer referred to the film as "a love letter to Yeoh", adding: "Everything Everywhere All At Once is extremely poignant, giving its 59-year-old star a chance to flex unexpected acting muscles while revisiting the high-flying fight choreography that made her a global icon back in the 1990s". In his review for Chicago Sun-Times, Jake Coyle wrote that although Everything Everywhere "can verge on overload, it's this liberating sense of limitless possibility that the movie leaves you filled with, both in its freewheeling anything-goes playfulness and in its surprisingly tender portrait of existential despair".
Dissenting reviews include those of Richard Brody for The New Yorker, who dismissed Everything Everywhere as a "sickly cynical feature-length directorial pitch reel for a Marvel movie", and Keith Garlington, who noted that while the film was an ambitious task, it "often gives way to overindulgence making this overlong and overstuffed genre stew a well-meaning but exhausting experience".
Letterboxd announced that Everything Everywhere All at Once had briefly become the highest-rated film of all time on the site, surpassing The Godfather (1972) and Parasite (2019). As of September 2022, it remains in the top fifteen. The New York Times named character Jobu Tupaki, played by Hsu, one of the 93 Most Stylish 'People' of 2022.
Garry Gillard | New: 17 December, 2022 | Now: 26 December, 2022