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In Everything Everywhere All At Once, we follow Chinese-American laundromat owner Evelyn Wang, who is recruited to save the universe from an incoming multiversal threat. As she leans into the power and skills of her alternate self from other dimensions, she learns more about herself and her family. The chaotic genre-jumping spectacle manages to pull a wide range of elements together around a powerful emotional core, delivering a hilarious and deeply affecting two hours. 

This film is built around two phenomenal performances from Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn, and Stephanie Hsu as her daughter Joy. Yeoh shows an incredible amount of range, and while we’re used to seeing her as a badass fighter in shows like Star Trek: Discovery or her many martial arts movie appearances, it’s rarer (especially in her Western work) for her to be able to show real vulnerability.

She also feels remarkably normal, in that you completely buy she’s only just about making it through life, with the biggest threat she faces being the IRS. Still, she owns the action hero moments as she embraces her newfound abilities, but it’s nonetheless a gradual process where the badassery feels earned – when she punches someone in the face, she still winces at the impact.

The counterpoint to Yeoh’s strained restraint is Hsu, who gets to be cool in a different way. As the reality-hopping shenanigans occur, she gets some incredible outfits designed by Shirley Kurata, carrying them with confidence and presence. At the same time, the moments where she’s desperately trying to connect with her mother (a distance in part caused by the family’s homophobia), are deeply emotionally affecting. The pain she exudes throughout is palpable, even just in the tone of her voice as she tries over and over to get her mother to listen. 

When the pair are together on screen, it’s like all the chaos slips away, and you’re focused solely on the struggle of their strained relationship at the heart of the picture. Other performers also do great jobs, most notably Ke Huy Quan as Evelyn’s endearing, bumbling, but good-hearted husband Waymond. The combination of his performance and the script give the role a surprising amount of depth – particularly in the back half. Jamie Lee Curtis also gives a drily fun turn as a scene-stealing auditor, while the broader ensemble all play their bit-parts with just the right amount of heightened, light-hearted silliness to make it work. 

Everything’s irreverent humour continues in the incredibly imaginative conception of what can be done with the boundless possibilities of infinite parallel worlds. There are very outlandish universes like the already-famous one where humans evolved to have hot dog fingers, and while this is played largely for laughs, these worlds get a deeper exploration than you would expect.

Writers and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels, additionally provide some striking homages to other works, particularly Wong Kar Wai’s sweeping romances and traditional martial arts cinema. Somehow, these wildly different styles are executed sharply by director of photography Larkin Seiple, with the aspect ratios and color grading being manipulated to make this work. It’s as if they took the lovingly-crafted pastiche style that the likes of Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino specialize in, but gave it a beating heart.

In spite of all the constantly-moving insanity, there’s still an impressively persistent emotional core to everything that unfolds and remains continually reinforced, particularly in relation to the lead performers. This is a film about finding love and connection when you’ve been ground down. Even the bizarre hot dog-handed world gets to have its own deep moments that will likely make you cry. At times, it can feel a little too eager to tie up its own loose ends without giving the invocation of heavier subject matter time to breathe, particularly surrounding the family’s alienation of the queer daughter. However, there’s an earnestness which means that even the oversimplified emotional beats hit hard.

Everything Everywhere All At Once understands that the world is infinitely big and scary, and that we often feel like we are the worst versions of ourselves. And yet, it manages to effectively advocate for us to keep going, to seek the connections and moments that make life worth it. From the irreverent humour to homages via several standout performances, we are reminded that in a world where it feels like nothing matters – we have to find those little moments to live for.

This article contains major spoilers for the Moon Knight season finale

Moon Knight‘s season finale has just been released and we’re happy to report the show ends on a high note. The episode delivered on showing Moon Knight / Mr. Knight kicking ass in unison, introduced an incredible-looking new hero in Layla/Tawaret, and showed us a killer kaiju battle between Khonshu and the giant crocodile god Ammit.

But it is the last moments of the episode that really get fans talking. Throughout the show, we’ve seen hints that Spector’s third personality from the comics, taxi driver Jake Lockley, is also present. His appearances so far have been very subtle, but we got a major hint that he was present mid-way through the episode when neither Marc nor Steven brought down Harrow in Cairo.

The episode closes with Khonshu apparently fulfilling his promise to free the pair, though the mid-credits scene shows it’s not quite as simple as that. Khonshu may have released Marc and Steven, but it seems that Jake Lockley is still very willing to carry out Khonshu’s homicidal wishes.

And so we see the (Spanish-speaking) Jake retrieve Harrow from the (cutely named) Sienkiewicz Psychiatric Hospital, putting him in the back of a limo, and cold-heartedly shooting him in the head.

The episode didn’t close with a promise of a second season as Loki did, but this dangling plot thread feels like it needs to be resolved, so chances are good that Moon Knight will one day return. However, Oscar Isaac is a busy man and thus there might be a delay before we get to binge on the future adventures of Marc Spector/Steven Grant/Jake Lockley. Let’s hope it’s not too long.

Moon Knight is available to stream in full on Disney Plus.

Plenty of famous Hollywood faces have played themselves on the big and small screens before, but it goes without saying that there’s never been an actor quite like Nicolas Cage. With that in mind, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a movie that simply wouldn’t have worked with anyone else in the lead, not least of all because few top talents would be able to leave their ego firmly at the door and embrace the unbridled self-aware insanity of Tom Gormican’s bonkers meta action comedy.

Cage is the cinematic equivalent of a mystery wrapped in an enigma, who remains shrouded by his own unique levels of mystique; he’s an Academy Award winner that’s been lauded by many of his peers and contemporaries as an all-time great, but he’s also slummed it through a succession of banal VOD thrillers.

He was one of the biggest box office draws in the business at the peak of his powers, but also a relentless source of fascination and memes, with his signature and bespoke performative style making him the butt of as many jokes as he has been the subject of overwhelmingly enthusiastic acclaim.

Cage knows this, and admitted that The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent was the ideal opportunity to embrace it. The screenplay from Gormican and co-writer Kevin Etten is fully cognizant of the leading man’s life and times, as well as his ups and downs, using it to the fullest by dropping the semi-fictionalized Nick Cage into a zany story of birthday parties, newfound friendships, drug cartels, kidnappings, family drama, the CIA, and so much more.

After missing out on a role in David Gordon Green’s new project by overzealously monologuing in a thick Boston accent, Neil Patrick Harris’ agent Richard Fink outlines in no uncertain terms that Cage is in mountains of debt and short on options. Throw in the strained relationship with Sharon Horgan’s soon-to-be ex-wife Olivia, not to mention the growing distance from Lily Sheen’s daughter Addy, Nick finds himself in the midst of a personal, professional, and existential crisis.

That’s without mentioning the fact he’s haunted by the ghost of Nicky, a younger and power-hungry hallucination of himself that urges Nick to stop focusing on being an actor, and reclaim his place as an A-list movie star. They talk, they argue, and they even make out at one stage, because that’s the sort of offbeat idiosyncrasies we’re conditioned to expect from the first minute.

Accepting the million-dollar offer of Pedro Pascal’s Javi Gutierez, Nick finds himself accosted by Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz’s federal agents, who task the action hero to go undercover on a special assignment to help them crack a high-profile abduction, but Cage soon finds himself developing a genuine bromance with Pascal’s superfan, which is cemented over a screening of Paddington 2.

The bulk of that setup is packed into the first act of Massive Talent, but once the lay of the land has been established, things escalate into fantastically outlandish territory. You don’t have to be a Cage enthusiast on the scale of Javi to appreciate the film, with most of the wink-wink references relegated to name-drops of popular titles, or Cage resolutely affirming the underrated status of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin or Guarding Tess.

Instead of playing the premise for the broadest of laughs, the best moments of Massive Talent come from Cage looking inward, while still reflecting on his storied legacy. He repeatedly insists that it’s not a comeback because he never went away, he just needs the right part to help him cement his credentials once again. The fact this particular project puts the exclamation point on exactly that only serves to add another coincidentally brilliant wrinkle to the entire operation.

Similarly, while it would have been easy for Cage to go as broad as possible in his performance (which he admittedly does at points, although it’s done in the most pleasingly knowing fashion), he hits some emotional beats that you wouldn’t expect to find in such a wacky story. He acknowledges his weaknesses as an actor, father, husband, and friend, which is where the lines between Nicolas and Nick are at their most blurred.

It isn’t a one-man show by any stretch of the imagination, either, with Pascal proving to be an absolute hoot as Javi. An aspiring screenwriter hoping to make his personal and professional dreams come true with a single wave of his checkbook, he puts in just as much effort as his opposite number to ensure the heartwarming dynamic between the two leads remains the driving force of the narrative, which isn’t an easy thing to do when Massive Talent was always going to be The Nicolas Cage Show first and foremost.

Despite Cage’s initial skepticism at being a hired party guest, he and Javi develop an instant chemistry that carries the narrative and storytelling load. They jump off cliffs, drive around the picturesque Spanish coastline, get high on LSD and freak out, help each other become better and more understanding men, declare their love for each other, and get involved in shootouts, fistfights, and car chases. The two of them hold nothing back, whether it’s the quiet and intimate moments or the bravura blockbuster shenanigans plastered all over the marketing, with Pascal’s penchant for understated comedy adding yet another impressive weapon to his expanding arsenal.

The weakest part of Massive Talent by far is the third act, which isn’t all that much of a surprise when it abandons the decidedly deep and thought-provoking examination of who both audiences and Nick think he really is, in favor of standard action comedy beats that don’t bring anything new to the table other than nefarious forces making constant references to the absurdity of a famous actor being involved. It isn’t a coincidence that the story sags when nuance and authenticity are abandoned in favor of spectacle, but it’s a minor quibble in an otherwise excellent genre-bending celebration of all things Cage.

Nicolas Cage the actor playing Nick Cage the fictional creation, who in turn is haunted by the specter of Nicky Cage in a film that meditates and ruminates on the past, present, and future of both the real and fictional Cage under the guise of an action comedy that ultimately ends with Nick Cage watching Nicolas Cage in an in-universe movie about the adventure Nick Cage has just experienced is enough to make your head spin if you think about it for too long, but The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent delivers an adrenaline rush of sheer joy that’s destined to enjoy a long-lasting life as a stone-cold cult classic, not to mention one of the bravest, boldest, and cleverest things the star has ever done.