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Y ou'd have to be a churl to take against John Carney's bracing, low-budget account of the personal and professional relationship that blooms between an Irish busker (Glen Hansard) and a Czech migrant (Marketa Irglova). It's a soulful valentine to music, friendship and the joys of honest hard graft, played out in the bedsits and recording studios of a deglamourised Dublin, and running to the kind of warm, easy rhythms that typified Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise. The film's unabashed romanticism might start to grate were it not for Carney's sharp feel for the impoverished circumstances of his main characters; the sense that, for all their flirty banter and boisterous singalongs, these people are pretty much clinging on by their fingertips. It's the grit that makes the pearl.

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The Movie Review: 'Once'

Cillian Murphy is a rising young actor who has delivered several fine performances of late (in Batman Begins , Red Eye , and Breakfast on Pluto , among others) and possesses arguably the most piercing blue eyes since Paul Newman. So it is a considerable surprise that, to date, his greatest contribution to cinema may be a movie he wasn't in.

Murphy, who before taking up acting was a nearly-signed rock singer, had been slated to star in and produce Once , an indie-rock musical directed by fellow Irishman John Carney. But when Murphy discovered that Carney had cast a nonprofessional actress as his co-lead and heard some of the vocally complex songs he was expected to sing, he--and with him, all the financing--pulled out of the project.

So Carney turned to the man who had written the songs and recommended the female lead in the first place: Glen Hansard of the Irish band The Frames. (Carney had been the group's bassist in the early 1990s.) Hansard, who'd appeared in exactly one film--a supporting role in Alan Parker's The Commitments 15 years earlier--was persuaded to play the missing lead, and Carney put the film together in three weeks for a meager $150,000, all of it supplied by the Irish Film Board.

The result should shame filmmakers with budgets a thousand times larger. Once is a small miracle, an unprepossessing gem that is at once true to life and utterly magical. It is also one of the best romantic comedies in a generation, provided one is willing to define that category broadly enough to accept a film that delivers few jokes and contains just a single kiss--on the cheek. The word "winsome" was invented for experiences such as this.

The winner of the audience award at Sundance, Once opened a few weeks ago in a tiny number of theatres scattered across the country. And while that number has increased each week (to 120 screens nationwide, at last counting), it won't be around for long, so if you can find it, see it. Quickly. (Yes, this is a late recommendation, but one, I think, firmly in the better-than-never camp.)

Hansard plays a Dublin busker (i.e., street musician) who performs covers for the crowds by day and his own compositions to the empty sidewalk by night. Until one night, that is, when the sidewalk turns out not to be empty. A young Czech immigrant (Markéta Irglová) stops to listen and then questions him with invasive but charming directness: Who did you write that song for? Where is she? Is she dead? Hansard is at first put off by his inquisitor, but gradually warms. When she asks what his day job is, a concrete link is formed: He fixes vacuum cleaners in his dad's shop; she has a vacuum cleaner in need of fixing. Might she bring it by for him to take a look at?

Thus begins one of the most endearing associations in recent cinema. She brings her Hoover by the next day, dragging it by the hose like a leashed puppy. Hansard is again annoyed by the imposition, but ultimately agrees to take a look at the machine. ("What's wrong with it?" he asks. "It's fucked," she replies matter-of-factly, draining the word of any hint of obscenity.) Soon enough, their relationship moves beyond vacuum cleaners. Irglová, too, is a musician, a classically trained piano player. And while she is too poor to afford her own piano, the proprietor of a music shop allows her to play one in the back of his store during lunchtime. Irglová invites Hansard to join her with his guitar and they share a duet, tentatively at first and then with increasing confidence. (One of the few coynesses of the film--though one easy to ignore--is that neither of the lead characters is given a name.) From this first, informal collaboration arise others: She writes lyrics for one of his songs, and later joins the thrown-together "band" with whom he records demos of his music.

With the exception of one clumsy proposition, angrily declined, it is never stated but always evident that the two are also falling in love. But there are complicating factors: the girlfriend who left Hansard for London and for whom he still pines; the mother and young daughter who live with Irglová, and the estranged husband she left behind in the Czech Republic. And though these might appear to be surmountable obstacles, neither character makes any great effort to surmount them. It's as if both recognize that what they have between them, their romantic non-romance, is too delicate to burden with heavier demands.

The result is a love-affair-by-other-means, and the means are primarily musical. Opinions will vary of the songs themselves, which have been widely compared, both in flattery and disdain, to Coldplay. (For my part, I found them frequently affecting, though the tendency of almost every one to begin as a quiet lament before building to a wailing chorus becomes a little tiresome.) On some level, though, it hardly matters: Hansard and Irglová are not performing for us, exactly, but for themselves and for one another, their songs like a runoff channel for the overflow of feelings they cannot share directly. The result is musical numbers that are simultaneously undersold and brimming with meaning. One in particular, in which Irglová walks the nighttime streets in pajamas and bunny slippers, composing lyrics as she listens to her Discman, is the most evocative, unforgettable sequence I've seen in a movie this year.

Hansard is very good as a likable layabout whose stabs at cynicism do nothing to obscure a generous heart. But Irglová is a true find. Just 19 years old, the Czech singer-songwriter (with whom Hansard had collaborated on an earlier album) conjures a character with thicker armor than her costar and, belying her age, greater maturity. She, like the film, knows that the easiest, most obvious thing to do (kiss him, for goodness sake!) is not necessarily what will serve her best in the end. Rather than presenting her child and husband as complications to be solved, the movie recognizes that they are her reality; Hansard is the complication. In an era when Hollywood has largely lost the ability to distinguish between romance and sex, Once is the rare film that recognizes that love is no less love for being held in check, it is merely a different kind of love. Sixty years after David Lean's most intimate masterpiece, Brief Encounter , this is still a controversial cinematic assertion.

The film Once resembles still more closely, though, is Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise , another minor-key marvel of romantic portraiture. As in that film, the two leads do not face any particular challenges together beyond the simple, and yet immensely complicated, task of deciding what they think of one another and what they want to do about it. Indeed, apart from their underlying conflicts, the lives of Hansard and Irglová seem almost charmed: Whereas a typical film would include a few unhappy swerves on the road to the successful demo session, Once motors pleasantly along from small victory to small victory. The potential heavies encountered--Hansard's dad, the man in charge of a bank loan, the skeptical recording engineer--are all quickly won over; the eventual fruition of his music career seems secure. All that remains is the question of love. I won't say how the film answers it, except to note that it is exactly right, an ending equal parts happy and sad, and somehow deeply affirming--a remarkable achievement at any price.

This post originally appeared at TNR.com.

A Guardian Once More

A Guardian Once More is an achievement you can start by interacting with a Weathered Book on the second floor of Arborstone in the library, near Researcher Hui . To start this achievement you need to have Arborstone Revitalization : Entertaining Amenities mastery unlocked.

Collection items one through six must be completed in order.

After finishing the achievement you will be able to ring bells in Seitung Province and one in Arborstone to receive Zunraa's Gift .

Achievement [ edit ]

Collection items [ edit ]

Text during the spirit portal segments [ edit ].

As you step through the door to this strange world, Into the dark echoes of Cantha's past, The gravity of despair weighs upon you as you realize... You stand amid the stained memories of the Ministry's purge. Alone. No, you sense him. Feel his light, as though you are... one. He is here.

You emerge, choked by the sharp inhale of icy breath, But the cold sinks within you, hardens to dread. His dread. Yours. You ache, watching those you vowed to protect... Destroy themselves. And feel your vow shatter like their mortal bones.

Despair suffocates you. Between gasps, you watch them... Cruel people. No, he corrects you: cruel actions. Lost souls following orders from those they've never seen in flesh... Burning flesh... The smell stains your nostrils. You hold your breath to block the scent of death.

Are they monsters? Fueled by evil? No- for most, it's fear. And their deepest fear is others knowing they're afraid, So they mask themselves in hate, To shield their true faces, even from themselves. But he shows you past illusions, and what you see is worth protecting.

When he left the mortal world, was he enraged? Did he simply turn and go, disillusioned, Ignoring screams of children, unconcerned with elders' wails? Suddenly, you feel as though you're crying, but in place of tears, You shed your doubts, exchanging them for truth: he did not choose this.

You blink, trying to lift the veil of dream from consciousness. Clouded still, the air chills your exhalations, which linger like hanged phantoms. You do not recognize this place, but he is well acquainted. Limbs bound by shackles, frozen in death's clenched hands, He conjures light to guide you to this tomb, where he's been left to rot.

Some say the pages of history are scribed in blood... And here, the bloodshed is so potent, a taste of foul iron taints your tongue, Sickening him with reminders of those he failed to save. You plead with him to forgive himself, but he doesn't hear you. Or perhaps he's choosing not to listen.

In this dark past, you feel as though you walk within time itself, Wandering this raw space between being and nonbeing, Wondering, "Did they hear creation's whisper calling them back?" "Or was it an abrupt fade to black?" "And do you really want to know the answer?"

He shares with you a moment, not seen, but felt: Bright noise, brief explosions that split light, tear life. Quick flashes illuminate a child's silhouette, You shield her, white hot pain brands your side, she cries. Blinded, you feel your limbs being bound, and fall, half dead on the ground.

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Few things in life are certain besides death, taxes, and maybe the never-ending task that is doing laundry. At least that’s where the characters in writer/directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert , collectively known as Daniels, new film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” find themselves initially. That is, until they take an emotional, philosophical, and deeply weird trip through the looking glass into the multiverse and discover metaphysical wisdom along the way.

In this love letter to genre cinema, Michelle Yeoh gives a virtuoso performance as Evelyn Wang, a weary owner of a laundromat under IRS audit. We first meet her enjoying a happy moment with her husband Waymond ( Ke Huy Quan ) and their daughter Joy ( Stephanie Hsu ). We see their smiling faces reflected in a mirror on their living room wall. As the camera literally zooms through the mirror, Evelyn’s smile fades, now seated at a table awash with business receipts. She’s preparing for a meeting with an auditor while simultaneously trying to cook food for a Chinese New Year party that will live up to the high standards of her visiting father Gong Gong ( James Hong , wiley as ever).

On top of juggling her father’s visit and the tax audit, Evelyn’s sullen daughter Joy wants to bring her girlfriend Becky ( Tallie Medel ) to the party and her husband wants to talk about the state of their marriage. Just as Evelyn begins to feel overwhelmed by everything happening in her life she’s visited by another version of Waymond from what he calls the Alpha verse. Here humans have learned to “verse jump” and are threatened by an omniverse agent of chaos known as Jobu Tupaki. Soon, Evelyn is thrust into a universe-hopping adventure that has her questioning everything she thought she knew about her life, her failures, and her love for her family.

Most of the action is set in an IRS office building in Simi Valley (which, as a Californian, had me in stitches), where Evelyn must battle IRS agent Diedre ( Jamie Lee Curtis , having the time of her life), a troop of security guards, and possibly everyone else she’s ever met. Production designer Jason Kisvarday crafts a seemingly endless cubicle-filled office where everything from the blade of a paper trimmer to a butt plug shaped auditor of the year awards become fair game in a battle to save the universe.

Editor Paul Rogers' breakneck pace matches the script’s frenetic dialogue, with layers of universes simultaneously folding into each other while also propelling Evelyn’s internal journey. Match cuts seamlessly connect the universes together, while playful cuts help emphasize the humor at the heart of the film.

Born from choices both made and not made, each universe has a distinct look and feel, with winking film references ranging from “ The Matrix ” to “ The Fall ” to “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ” to “In The Mood For Love” to “ Ratatouille .” Even Michelle Yeoh’s own legacy finds its way into the film with loving callbacks to her Hong Kong action film days and the wuxia classic “ Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon .” The fight sequences, choreographed by Andy and Brian Le , have a balletic beauty to them, wisely shot by cinematographer Larkin Seiple in wide shots allowing whole bodies to fill the frame.

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. She is a movie star and this is a movie that knows it. Watching her shine so bright and clearly having a ball brought tears to my eyes more than once.

Just as Evelyn taps into Yeoh’s iconography, facets of Waymond can be found throughout Quan’s unique career. The comic timing from his childhood roles as Data in “ The Goonies ” and Short Round in “ Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ” echoes in Evelyn’s nebbish husband. His work as a fight coordinator shows through in Alpha’s slick action hero capable of using a fanny pack to take out a group of attackers. Even his time as an assistant director to Wong Kar Wai on “2046” can be found in the universe where he plays the debonair one who got away. Quan tackles these variations with aplomb, bringing pathos to each and serving as a gentle reminder that there's strength in kindness.

As Evelyn and Waymond’s relationship ebbs and flows in iterations through the multiverses, it’s their daughter Joy who proves to be the lynchpin. In a true breakout performance from Stephanie Hsu, Joy represents a growing generational divide. Joy carries the weight of Evelyn’s fractured relationship with her grandfather and the disappointments of an American dream unattained. Her queerness as foreign to her mother as the country was when she herself first arrived. Her aimlessness a greater disappointment because of all that Eveyln sacrificed for her to have more options in life than she did. This pressure manifests in a rebellion so great it stretches beyond the multiverses into a realm where a giant everything bagel looms like a black hole ready to suck everyone into the void.

If the void arises from the compounding of generational trauma, the Daniels posit that it can be reversed through the unconditional love passed down through those same generations, if we choose compassion and understanding over judgment and rejection. Chaos reigns and life may only ever make sense in fleeting moments, but it’s those moments we should cherish. Moments of love and camaraderie. Sometimes they happen over time. Sometimes they happen all at once.

This review was filed from the premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. The film opens on March 25th.

Marya E. Gates

Marya E. Gates is a freelance film and culture writer based in Los Angeles and Chicago. She studied Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley, and also has an overpriced and underused MFA in Film Production. Other bylines include Moviefone, The Playlist, Crooked Marquee, Nerdist, and Vulture.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once movie poster

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2023)

Rated R for some violence, sexual material and language.

Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang

Stephanie Hsu as Joy Wang / Jobu Tupaki

James Hong as Gong Gong

Jonathan Ke Quan as Waymond Wang

Jamie Lee Curtis as Deirdre Beaubeirdra

Anthony Molinari as Police - Confetti

Jenny Slate as Big Nose

Andy Le as Alpha Jumper - Bigger Trophy

Brian Le as Alpha Jumper - Trophy

Daniel Scheinert as District Manager

Harry Shum Jr. as Chad

Boon Pin Koh as Maternity Doctor

Daniel Scheinert

Cinematographer

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Everything Everywhere All At Once review – ambitious, exhausting trip to the multiverse

Michelle Yeoh travels from one reality to the other in a bold and often thrilling sci-fi caper that ultimately isn’t quite as profound as it thinks it is

In the music video for Lil Jon and DJ Snake’s sextuple-platinum banger Turn Down for What, an unspecified force possesses the pelvises of co-director Daniel Kwan and actor Sunita Mani, compelling them to twerk, dagger and gyrate with such intense ardor that they repeatedly blast through the floor and into the next level of a high-rise apartment complex. This is an OK summary of the waggish sense of humor at play in Kwan and co-director Daniel Scheinert’s new feature Everything Everywhere All at Once, a metaphysical martial arts epic that sees a butt plug as a potential source of power and arm-length dildos as an acceptable substitute for sai knives. (Also, Mani pops back up as a Bollywood star in a film-within-the-film.)

But the early viral triumph from the film-making duo known simply as Daniels is most predictive in the way it thrusts the viewer through physical space with enough velocity to shatter its divisions, as if the Kool-Aid Man had spent all night pounding Jägerbombs and decided to upgrade his catchphrase to “FUCK YEAH!”

Party time is over in Daniels’ hysterically ambitious latest, which expands its scope from a single building to the entirety of human history splayed across the full breadth of the multiverse, and accepts a weightier set of emotional stakes to match. Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh, unstoppable), a Chinese American immigrant/laundromat owner/last hope for all existence, slingshots between realities with the raw kinetic energy of a boulder launched by a trebuchet. Sometimes, she need only open a door to find herself in another iteration of her life, or walk backward through bushes, or tap the Bluetooth-earpiece-looking gizmos an ally gives her. Daniels delight in creatively collapsing the distance that separates scenes, lines of dialogue, or even shots, an all-out offensive of careening camera movement and frenetic editing that condenses what feels like 12 hours of movie into two and a half. And yet these often impressively nutso formal backflips land in a position of pedestrian sentimentality, and then upbraid anyone resisting the viscous flood of sap for their cynicism.

Like many middle-aged people with a frustrating professional standing, a spouse (reedy-voiced Ke Huy Quan) they’ve forgotten how to relate to, and a child (Stephanie Hsu) they can’t understand, Evelyn spends a lot of time imagining the branching paths her years could have taken. Her mind wanders along these lines during a meeting with the tax auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis, paunchy and harsh and humane) informing her that she has one last chance to get her shit together, at which point both the narrative and lens fracture. As events progress in the “normal” chronology, dizzying cross-cuts flit between planes of being. The office complex turns into a beat-‘em-up gauntlet with some of the fiercest fight choreography of recent vintage in the American cinema; Evelyn winds up in a riff on Ratatouille with a hibachi raccoon; she and the auditor become lovers in a world where homo sapiens have hotdogs for fingers and pianos must be played by foot; as a movie star living out a moody Wong Kar-wai homage, she rues lost love.

The Rick and Morty-fied spin on Jet Li vehicle The One can be exhausting, but plenty of rewarding things are. The trouble starts with the painfully hit-and-miss humor, vacillating between Douglas Adams absurdism (an everything bagel made literal threatens to swallow all of creation in its infinite void), sophomoric schoolyard yuks (forming the classic hand-vagina opens an inter-dimensional portal), and aren’t-I-random non sequiturs. The secret to hopping between universes is doing something statistically improbable, like eating Chapstick or putting your shoes on the wrong feet. After a failed attempt, Evelyn is told “not weird enough”, an indicator of the googly-eyed kooky-for-its-own-sake attitude at times unfortunately reminiscent of Natalie Portman’s wiggle dance in Garden State.

The absolute earnestness required to get on board with the quirk factor in the first hour or so becomes crucial to stomaching the open-hearted affirmations of the latter half. The fixation on alternate timelines ultimately comes from a timely-ish anxiety that we’re now in the darkest one, evident in a vague line about how no one These Days knows their neighbors. The bagel of doom and its tightening grip on Evelyn’s Gen Z daughter lend themselves to the climactic declaration that there’s nothing worse than submitting to the nihilism so trendy with the next generation. Our lone hope of recourse is to embrace all the love and beauty surrounding us, if only we’re present enough to see it. These aren’t faulty ideas, and they’re delivered here with greater novelty than in the comparably sincere indies peddling these same feel-gooderies every Sundance can muster. A subtitled conversation between rocks on a barren planet locates the Don Hertzfeldt note of goofy profundity the film spends hours searching for, but the script then undermines its thin epiphanies by reiterating them a few times to ensure the audience has soaked in all the uplift.

While those of us less susceptible to sentimentality may give it from a position of remote detachment, Kwan and Scheinert deserve some measure of recognition. They’ve constructed a large, elaborate, polished and detailed expression of a vision informed by a demented muse they staunchly refuse to stop following. It’s nice that we have two guys like this in the industry during a period characterized by a drought of visual distinction and personal authorship, and it’s hard to argue against the inevitability that a lot of people will get a lot out of this massive hunk of movie. All the same, the herculean effort to prove nothing short of the inherent worth in life itself comes up short, yielding little more than tweetable nuggets about how “we’re all small and stupid”. However dazzling the vortexes this film shoots us through at supersonic speed may be, they still deposit us somewhere we’ve been before.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is out in US cinemas on 25 March with a UK date to be announced

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‘Scream VI’ Review: Once More Unto the Mask, as Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega Battle Ghostface in New York

The sequel to the requel is set in the city, where the series finds fresh ways to heighten old scares.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

SCREAM VI, (aka SCREAM 6), Ghostface, 2023. ph: Philippe Bosse / © Paramount Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection

This elaborate double sequence, with its creepier-than-usual overtones (that bro describes how he relished committing a copycat murder), does a nice job of setting the table for “Scream VI,” the first entry in the series that unfolds in a place like New York City. The four survivors from “Scream,” last year’s “requel,” are all back, having dubbed themselves “the Core Four”: Sam Carpenter ( Melissa Barrera ), who triumphantly ended that movie by executing the film’s version of Ghostface; Sam’s half-sister, Tara ( Jenna Ortega ), who’s attending Blackmore College in New York (a fictional university that feels like NYU), and whom Sam hovers around like an overprotective parent; and Tara’s fellow student transplants, the whip-smart horror geek Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and her sexy brother Chad (Mason Gooding).

The directors, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, and screenwriters, James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, are also back. In their hands, it’s Mindy the brainiac horror superfan who once again elucidates the rules for how a “Scream” movie works, incorporating, as before, a new audience-driven corporate cynicism about what movies can and will do for an encore. Once Ghostface kicks off his rampage, Mindy correctly notes that what the characters are now in the middle of isn’t merely a sequel but a franchise, and she lays down the rules for what that suggests. It means that the new movie has got to be bigger and showier. That it’s got to swing in a new direction and subvert expectations. And that the legacy characters are strictly expendable. “Scream VI” more or less lives up to those dictates.

In the ’90s, the “Scream” films, in their self-reflexive slasher-on-rewind way, channeled a genuine affection for cinema. In “Scream VI,” one of Ghostface’s victims says, “We have to finish the movie,” to which Ghostface replies, just before stabbing him, “Who gives a fuck about movies?” “Scream VI” holds the audience, but it also tweaks a genre that it knows all too well no longer matters. The Ghostface mask, like an old leather couch, is a little ratty and worn this time, and that befits a 27-year-old series that has now had nine different Ghostface Killers.

In “Scream VI,” Ghostface is far from coy. He busts right into the center of scenes, attacking Sam and Tara in a bodega (the cashier has a shotgun, but that’s not enough to stop him). And the movie pulls the mask right out from under us with a sequence, early on, in which Ghostface breaks into an apartment that contains just about all the main characters, so we think, “It can’t be any of them.” We’re also given a good reason to think that it can’t be one of the roommates, the erotically rambunctious Quinn (Liana Liberato), whose father (Dermot Mulroney) is the police officer on the case. So that leaves…who? Ethan (Jack Champion) the stammering virgin nerd? Too easy.

Melissa Barrera has the fire and skill to play Sam as a woman so possessed with destroying the killer that it leaves her…possessed. Sam emerged as the heroine of “Scream,” but since then an online conspiracy theory has smeared her with the insinuation that she was actually the killer. And since she destroyed Ghostface with a vengeance equal to his own, she thinks — or at least her therapist (Henry Czerny) does — “Maybe I am a killer.” Between that and protecting Tara, Sam has a lot on her mind. The new stardom of Jenna Ortega, as the title character of “Wednesday,” will only help “Scream VI” at the box office, and she invests Tara with a surly spunk that counts. Courteney Cox makes sure that the return of Gale Weathers feels like more than a token legacy gesture, and ditto for Hayden Panettiere, whose Kirby Reed has returned (from “Scream 4”!) as an FBI agent, though her best scene is matching horror-movie assessments with Mindy.

The “Scream” series, in its first two installments (before it stalled creatively in “Scream III”), was always the slasher series that was too self-conscious to be just a slasher series. Now it’s the slasher series that’s just self-conscious enough not to be a pointless retread. This is really part two of the requel, which may be why it doesn’t wear out its welcome (though it could easily have been just 100 minutes long). There’s a terrific sequence set on Halloween night on a subway car teaming with costumed freaks. And there are several scenes that unfold in a kind of underground shrine, constructed in an abandoned movie theater, where the killer has assembled and displayed all the key evidence from all the cases. It’s a knowing nod to the fact that the series itself now faces the prospect of turning into a kind of “Scream” museum. But this team of filmmakers might just be smart enough to avoid that, as long as they keep coming up with ways to turn the cynical entropy that usually drags down horror series into the very thing that makes “Scream” scream.

Reviewed at Regal Union Square, March 7, 2023. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 126 MIN.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once Passes Return of the King as Most-Awarded Movie Ever

And the oscars haven't even happened yet..

once more film review guardian

Everything Everywhere All at Once can add another historic win to its list.

According to IGN’s calculations, the multiversal hit is now the most-awarded film ever with 158 accolades to date from major critics organizations and awards bodies. This spot was previously held by The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which earned 101 major awards by IGN’s math.

IGN painstakingly tallied every single accolade Everything Everywhere All at Once has received this awards season, including those from major critics organizations and pre-Oscars awards such as the Golden Globes, SAG Awards, and Indie Spirits.

Now, some caveats, and why our math may look different from yours: not every single critics’ organization made the cut, and neither did things like IGN’s own year-end best-of list . If every single nomination and award was counted, Everything Everywhere All At Once would still beat out Return of the King in both awards and nominations (336 awards, 691 nominations to 213 awards, 337 nominations).

once more film review guardian

Additionally, in the 20 years since the release of Return of the King, a whole new slew of organizations, critics circles, and websites began giving out their own awards to movies. For EEAAO, the amount of awards it won was heavily influenced by the number of organizations that nominated it (110 compared to ROTK’s 90).

In an effort to level the playing field, IGN narrowed the list down to only award-giving bodies that recognized both films. Out of the 152 total organizations that gave nominations to EEAAO and ROTK, only 45 recognized both films. Narrowing down their totals to just these 45 organizations, EEAAO still has ROTK beat when it comes to awards (138 to 127), nominations (295 to 189), and organizations that gave them an award (39 to 37). See below a quick look at IGN's math.

once more film review guardian

There's no doubting Everything Everywhere All at Once's breakthroughs in Hollywood over this past year. Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan made history at the SAG Awards last month for their portrayals of Evelyn Wang and Waymond Wang, respectively. Yeoh became the first Asian best actress film winner in SAG history, while Quan became the first Asian male to win the outstanding supporting actor award in film.

With 11 Oscar nominations under its belt, Everything Everywhere All at Once could score big at the 95th Academy Awards on Sunday.

Michaela Zee is a freelance news writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @michaelakzee.

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