This article is taken from the July 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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I recently saw a film that is a testament to superficial cinematic complexity. It was directed by one movie-making dyad, the Daniels (Daniel Kwan, who is Chinese, and Daniel Scheinert, who is not), and produced by another, the Russo brothers (Anthony and Joseph, who have directed four films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe).

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a film “about” the multiverse, or rather, the multiverse forms its thematic framework — the idea that there are multiple universes and that it might be possible to “‘versejump” and thus explore multiple identities or versions of oneself. Surely, that is one way of explaining the cinematic urge.

What follows is a vertiginous mash-up of cinematic genres and tropes executed with dazzling confidence

Originally written for the Chinese martial arts actor, Jackie Chan, it stars another veteran of the action genre, Michelle Yeoh, as Evelyn, the proprietress of a laundromat somewhere in America, who is facing an IRS audit that could bankrupt her business, at the same time as various crises in her dysfunctional family — a husband wanting a divorce, a cantankerous father just arrived from China, and a lesbian daughter with a new girlfriend in tow.

During a meeting with IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre (played by Jamie Lee Curtis), her husband’s body is taken over by a version of himself from the Alphaverse, who proceeds to explain how she can verse-jump using an earpiece. Every jump has the potential to alter her destiny and take the story we are watching in a completely new direction.

What follows is a vertiginous mash-up of cinematic genres and tropes executed with dazzling confidence. But for all its virtuosity and entertainment value the overriding effect it has on the spectator is one of extreme enervation. Evelyn’s father is played by the experienced Chinese actor, James Hong, who has played every Asian character you can think of, but especially the crime lord in John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China.

In one universe Evelyn is in a lesbian relationship with Beaubeirdre, but they both have floppy sausages for fingers and play piano sonatas with their (normal) toes; in another universe she has wandered into Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), an intensely stylised, nostalgic love story set in 1960s Hong Kong. And there are plenty of martial arts scenes, including a fight using giant sex toys.

“Everything” is referenced from anime to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1966), to Rick and Morty (the animated sci-fi sitcom). Some of the visual gags are enchanting, but the overall impression is that the writer-directors are trying too hard.

The Daniels come from a music video background and seem to suffer from a typically millennial lack of attention span. Everywhere Everything All at Once stakes a claim for complexity but ultimately projects a banal message: that family members ought to be kinder to one another. It has grossed $83 million worldwide.

BFI Southbank has just been showing a season of films by Robert Bresson and is about to devote two months to the Bengali master Satyajit Ray. Bresson started directing in 1943 with Les Anges du péché, Ray in 1955 with Pather Panchali. Bresson only made 13 features, Ray produced 29.

Bresson had been a painter and photographer, Ray a graphic artist who was much influenced by Indian art. Bresson was Catholic pantheist, Ray a Vaishnava Hindu. And whereas Bresson’s greatest cinematic influence (so he said) was Chaplin, Ray was primarily influenced by Renoir, De Sica, and, among his contemporaries, Kurosawa and Bergman.

Bresson preferred non-professional actors, or “models”, and used music sparingly, though sometimes to great effect, as in the use of the Kyrie from Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor in A Man Escaped, his film about a wartime French resistance fighter’s escape from Lyon’s Montluc prison. Ray worked with both professional and non-professional actors, and he was a true polymath, writing detective and science-fiction stories for children, composing his film scores, and designing the posters for his movies.

Bresson and Ray showed that depth of emotion is often to be found in apparent stylistic simplicity rather than complexity

Although they chose very different paths, Bresson and Ray showed that depth of emotion is often to be found in apparent stylistic simplicity rather than complexity. These directors are rooted in humanism and tiny details in their films can assume enormous significance.

Using sounds, close-ups, medium shots of objects, and abstracting montage, Bresson’s films often have a frenetic rhythm. Ray’s films proceed at a stately pace, with camerawork and montage sublimated to the development of his characters in their realistic worlds.

Both provide immense spiritual nourishment. You can watch A Man Escaped (1956) on the BFI Player. The new 4K restoration of Pather Panchali, made by the Criterion Collection in collaboration with the Academy Film Archive, will be showing at BFI Southbank in July. You can also watch it on DVD or on the Criterion Channel.