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Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, US
Eager to celebrate a theatrical box-office win, Variety recently praised the success of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's equally moving and galling Everything Everywhere All at Once, chirping that its broad appeal beyond arthouse crowds attests not only to adult audiences' willingness to return to theatres for the right sort of movie, but also to the fact that "ticket buyers really love the concept of a multiverse." Dubious as Variety's audience-polling methodology might be, its characterization of the film as a timely non-Marvel alternative to multiverse mania captures something of the so-called Daniels' preternatural savviness at branding. The former music video directors- who first branched into features with Swiss Army Man (2016), an absurdist drama about a suicidal man whose life is redeemed by a farting corpse-have already shown an enviable mastery of snappy loglines. What they haven't yet done, however, is found a way to consistently temper their Barnumesque showmanship when the material at hand calls for sensitivity rather than absurdist non sequiturs.
Thus, while Everything Everywhere All at Once is a mature step up from the strained silliness of its predecessor, mining real feeling out of its stacked cast and granular specificity out of its milieu of fluorescent coin laundries and carpet-lined IRS offices, it's still the undisciplined product of a pair of spitballing concept artists, who too often find themselves pitching their way out of hiccups in characterization and allegory and embracing the shiny allure of the new whenever the challenges of nuance become too much to bear.
The film stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, a middle-aged laundromat owner whose only fleeting moments of respite from work, family, and taxes are when she catches a glimpse of a Bollywood musical on the TV above one of her machines. A workhorse careening from conflict to conflict, Evelyn is having an especially busy day as the film begins, her attentions divided between her IRS audit from officious pencil pusher Deidre (Jamie Lee Curtis), the...