‘The Farewell’
What struck me most about The Farewell—Lulu Wang’s Golden Globe-winning film that is now streaming free on Amazon Prime—was that it was an objectively messy film. And yet I found myself enjoying it so much more than many perfectly structured, polished films I saw in 2019. The reason, I realized, was because so many of those polished films came from perspectives I heard from hundreds of times before, while The Farewell—which stars Awkawfina as a Chinese-American millennial who struggles to understand her family’s decision not to tell her Chinese grandmother that she’s dying—was brand new. It’s a moving, personal story, and you won’t want to miss it. Just make sure you have the tissues ready.