Everything Everywhere All at Once

Nihilism, argued with, sincerely

The film's antagonist, Jobu Tupaki, has experienced every possible version of every possible life and concluded, reasonably, that nothing means anything if everything is equally possible. That's a real philosophical position, not a cartoon villain motive, and Everything Everywhere All at Once spends its increasingly unhinged runtime — inflatable-glove nunchucks, sentient rocks, a universe run entirely by raccoons — actually trying to argue with it. The film's answer isn't a rebuttal so much as a demonstration: choosing to care about one small, exhausting, mundane life, on purpose, in a universe of infinite alternatives, might be the only act that means anything specifically because it doesn't have to.

Michelle Yeoh's Evelyn is the film's real center of gravity, playing a woman failing at her marriage, her business, and her relationship with her daughter across every single universe she visits, until the multiverse chaos becomes less an action gimmick and more a way of finally seeing her own life's smallness for what it actually offers instead of what it's failed to become.

Joy Wang, and the film's real stakes

Stephanie Hsu's Joy carries the emotional core underneath all the formal invention: a queer daughter whose mother has never fully accepted her partner, driven, across infinite versions of herself, to the same despair regardless of how much power or possibility she accumulates. The film's insistence that Evelyn's small act of acceptance matters more than any cosmic power is its most sincere and least ironic idea, delivered inside its most absurd packaging.