Metacritic reviews

Here is an orgiastic work of slaphappy genius that doesn’t operate like a narrative film so much as a particle accelerator — or maybe a cosmic washing machine — that two psychotic 12-year-olds designed in the hopes of reconciling the anxiety of what our lives could be with the beauty of what they are.

It's impossible to describe. It's unlike anything you've ever seen. It's the best American movie in years, and certainly the best movie to hit theaters since the pandemic began.

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

It’s simply up to the viewer to relinquish control, strap into the rollercoaster seat and trust that the ride will take them somewhere transcendent. And it does.

In Everything Everywhere All At Once, a dizzying and aching bit of popcorn entertainment, in fact, Yeoh has never been better.

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.

The Daniels are unusually present ringmasters here, eschewing the flippancy that marred their splashy quirk-quake “Swiss Army Man” for a more big-feeling anarchic escapism. In their nifty code-switching, we-all-contain-multitudes metaphor, they’ve concocted something that feels genuinely attuned to our modern anxieties, but also embracing of our coping mechanisms.

Ultimately, though, Everything Everywhere is best appreciated for its grandiose ambitions, bombarding the viewer with its frenetic style while telling a poignant story about an older woman trying to make peace with her not-so-wonderful life.

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.

Everything Everywhere is ultimately too much of a good thing, a novel idea driven to the point of exhaustion.