Everything Everywhere All at Once

It may not have been the best of times at the box office, but 2022 produced a bumper crop of great films. But before we get to my annual, non-ranked list of the best the year had to offer, we need to talk about the worst.

Johnny Knoxville gleefully provokes bees into stinging Steve-O’s nether bits.

Worst Picture: Jackass Forever

If I wanted to watch 96 minutes of recreational genital torture, I’d go to the internet like Al Gore intended.

Austin Butler’s performance as Elvis is electrifying.

Best Memphis Film: Elvis

Okay, so it wasn’t filmed in Memphis, and we’re still a little sore about that. But Baz Luhrmann’s epic musical biopic was a certified crowd-pleaser. And despite the … questionable choices made by Tom Hanks as Col. Tom Parker, Austin Butler’s barn-burning turn as the King shed new light on the complicated psychology of the boy from Tupelo who became the most famous person the world has ever seen.

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Marcel, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Who would have thought that a film starring a YouTube sensation from 2010 would be one of the most emotionally complex experiences of the year? Jenny Slate’s profound voice performance and Mars Attacks! animator Eric Adkins bring Marcel to life so convincingly, you’ll be hanging on this little shell’s every word.

Best Cinematography: Top Gun: Maverick

Aerial photography has been an obsession of the movies since Wings won the first Best Picture Oscar in 1927. In Top Gun: Maverick, Claudio Miranda did it better than anyone ever has — and his work was rewarded with the top-grossing film of the year.

Best Performance: Daniel Radcliffe, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

In a year rife with good performances, no one committed to the bit like Daniel Radcliffe. Playing a well-known public figure like Weird Al Yankovic is hard enough, but Radcliffe went above and beyond in capturing the fabled accordionist’s unflappable manner and egalitarian worldview. He single-handedly carries this deeply strange biopic.

MVP: Mia Goth

In X, the neo-slasher about a group of filmmakers and their exploitative producer who rent a farmhouse in the Texas countryside to film a dirty movie, Mia Goth plays both the young, would-be porn star Maxine and the elderly serial killer Pearl. While they were on set, Goth came up with such a compelling backstory for Pearl that director Ti West started filming the prequel even before the first film hit theaters. Goth’s ferocious performance in Pearl includes a chilling soliloquy for the ages.

UFOs invade California in Jordan Peele’s *Nope*. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

Best Horror/Sci-fi/Western: Nope

Granted, it’s a pretty specific category, but even if Nope didn’t have it all to itself, it would still be one of the best films of the year. From killer chimps to a monster reveal that is downright beautiful, Jordan Peele’s latest is original, funny, and above all, creepy as hell. You’ll never look at a wind dancer the same way again.

Best Documentary: Moonage Daydream

Over the course of his 50-year career, David Bowie had many collaborators who claimed he had a knack for bringing out the best in them. That’s what happened when director Brett Morgen got access to the Bowie estate archive and spent four years creating a phantasmagorical tribute to the artist. This powerful ode to the creative spirit is 2022’s most groundbreaking film.

Best Director(s): Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, Neptune Frost

If it were only for the opening sequence, in which laborers sing a subversive work song in an actual Rwandan pit mine, Neptune Frost would still be one of the most stunning works of the decade. But it just gets better — and weirder — from there. This unique blend of Afrofuturism, cyberpunk, and Sondheim musical combines catchy tunes with revolutionary fervor. Most remarkably, it was made on a Kickstarter budget.

Michelle Yeoh in *Everything Everywhere All At Once*

Best Picture: Everything Everywhere All At Once

Every once in a while, a picture comes along that captures the zeitgeist so effortlessly it seems to have invented it from whole cloth. The elements of Everything Everywhere All At Once — multiverse stories, a renewed earnestness, a breezy visual style, and kung fu — were all floating in the ether, but it took Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert to wrangle them into one fantastic package. Anchored by Michelle Yeoh at the peak of her powers, a comeback turn by Ke Huy Quan, and a game-for-anything Jamie Lee Curtis, this is the rare film that features both eye-popping visuals and a deeply humane philosophy.

In this reality, from Rick and Morty to Doctor Strange, the multiverse is having a moment. Written and directed by Daniels, the team of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, who begins the story at the end of her rope. She is a Chinese American who runs a little laundromat with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). She’s having a hard time accepting that her teenage daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) has a girlfriend (Tallie Medel), and now that her father (James Hong) is visiting from China, Evelyn is desperate to keep the truth about her daughter’s sexuality from him. Her passive-aggressive machinations manage to alienate both her daughter and father. As if that’s not stressful enough, the laundry is getting audited by the IRS, and no-nonsense agent Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) is not happy with Evelyn’s tax deductions. Why would a laundry need a karaoke machine? It’s for Evelyn’s singing career, she says. What singing career? “She confuses her hobbies with business,” explains Waymond.

Somehow, that’s the worst cut of them all. Evelyn came to America with big dreams, but nothing turned out how she planned. And things are about to get worse once Waymond serves her with the divorce papers he’s had drawn up.

For Evelyn, it’s increasingly hard to focus on her downward spiral because she’s been secretly contacted by a Waymond from an alternate universe. There, he’s married to a version of Evelyn who invented technology to travel through the multiverse — or at least, he used to be before she was killed by a mysterious figure named Jobu Tupaki. The fashion-forward temporal villain is creating a doomsday device to destroy the multiverse. Waymond thinks this Evelyn can defeat Jobu, even though many other versions have failed, because she is living the worst possible version of her life and remains full of potential.

Daniels have crafted a tour de force of pop surrealism on a budget that wouldn’t cover Avengers: Endgame’s catering bill. Yeoh plays dozens of different versions of her character, some of which reference movie roles from her storied career. The “perfect” version of Evelyn, which Jobu teases her with, The Last Temptation of Christ-style, looks a lot like Michelle Yeoh’s real life: She’s an acclaimed actress attending the red carpet premiere of Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Jamie Lee Curtis flexes her considerable comedic talent as several versions of the cranky IRS agent — at one point, she stalks Evelyn with a machete, just as Michael Myers stalked her in Halloween. The great James Hong, who has appeared in 450 films in his 93 years, is razor-sharp, differentiating different versions of Gong Gong (Chinese for “grandpa”) with both subtle expressions and a mechanized battle wheelchair. Ke Huy Quan, who played Indiana Jones’ sidekick Short Round, returns to the screen after a 20-year absence and absolutely slays, switching from dweebish failed husband to swashbuckling time warrior, often in mid-sentence.

The story is witty and inventively structured, but it never cracks under the weight of self-reference. The random acts the reality-travelers have to perform to tilt the quantum probabilities make for some great visual comedy, especially during a wild, Hong Kong-inspired fight sequence inside the IRS building. Daniels don’t shy away from the philosophical implications of the multiverse, although they explicitly reject Rick and Morty-style nihilism in favor of a more Candide approach. Since the roads not taken are unknowable, who’s to say we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds?

Everything Everywhere All at Once
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