KEITH UHLICH
Everything Everywhere All at Once
film roundup
Apollo 10-1/2: A Space Age Childhood (Dir. Richard Linklater). Starring: Milo Coy, Jack Black, Lee Eddy. Writer-director Richard Linklater gets personal with his latest project, a deceptively gentle drama (animated in a similar style to the filmmaker’s previous features Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly) about a young boy, Stanley (Milo Coy), growing up in Houston, Texas around the time of the 1969 moon landing. Fantasy and reality intertwine, as does fiction and autobiography: Stanley’s utopic coming-of-age (days of 31flavor ice cream and Dark Shadows; nights of barbecues, record playing and tender family squabbles; political unrest relegated to the
evening news and a wacky relative or two) is clearly inspired by Linklater’s own upbringing. Every scene is suffused with the specificity of lived experience, even the make-believe B-plot in which Stanley imagines himself as the single-handed savior of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission. What’s particularly impressive is how the film eschews rose-colored nostalgia. Instead, Linklater compassionately portrays a child’s slow awakening to the fact that the world is filled with as many horrors as wonders, and that one needn’t cancel out the other. [PG-13] HHHH Everything Everywhere All at Once (Dirs.
Keith Uhlich is a NY-based writer published at Slant Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Time Out New York, among others. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. His personal website is (All (Parentheses)), accessible at keithuhlich.substack.com. 14
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Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert). Starring: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan. Better title: Too Much and Not Enough. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s (credited as The Daniels) intimate action epic doesn’t lack for invention or star power. Its most inspired stroke may be the casting of martial-arts superstar Michelle Yeoh, Temple of Doom and Goonies icon Ke Huy Quan, and inimitable character actor James Hong as an immigrant family facing troubles micro and macro. Yeoh’s Evelyn runs a laundromat that is close to bankruptcy (Jamie Lee Curtis memorably plays an unforgiving tax collector), and her relationships with her husband (Quan) and daughter (Stephanie Hsu) are close to breaking points. What a perfect time to discover C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E
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