"When I watched Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell,” it was a bit like revisiting my own past, as the young director who made “The Wedding Banquet” (1993). Both works center on a family celebration that’s based on a fundamental lie. In “The Wedding Banquet,” the wedding itself is a sham, an attempt to hide the main character’s gay identity from his Taiwanese family. In “The Farewell,” the banquet masks the fact that the grandmother Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhao) is terminally ill, something that is known to everyone except her: the family hasn’t told her, and so the joyous celebration is also a disguised, melancholy farewell. As a film by an Asian American writer-director, “The Farewell” operates between two cultures, American and Chinese. This awkwardness is embodied in the character of Billi (Awkwafina), who was born in China but moved to the States when she was 6 years old. Her feeling of displacement is at the heart of the film’s two most affecting scenes: first, when Billi reveals to her mother how much she missed growing up in China, how lost she felt as a child in America; and second, Billi’s farewell to her grandmother when she returns to the States. Such a scene could easily have been very sentimental; instead, it’s stoic and moving and quiet — a testimony to Lulu Wang’s control of her material, and a lovely ending to a very heartfelt and personal film."

"In many ways the perfect double bill with Young Mr. Lincoln. Democracy in America, Part II. There is a lot of carbon dating at work in this movie (how an interior, a suit, a gesture spell class—as in middle or working—and the historic moment, 1969, in which these classes function); but this unfurling of specificity is there to give us its metaphysical sense and resonance (the essence of labor, its afferent solitude, the pathos of success). A lot has to do with the amount of space the frame encloses and how resolutely off center it chooses to remain. For all its relentless attention to the matter at hand, Salesman is never a claustrophobic film. It is a film that often goes one (or two or three) better on what a long line of American writers (from Dreiser on) have tried to pin down. Which might explain why Salesman often feels like a valentine to a time in film (and society in general) when work defined character, registering the cusp moment after which it will cease to do so. One can look at Salesman and weep when what rules as “documentary” these days comes to mind; one can—maybe naively—take the film as a perfect illustration of what the genre might still produce; one can celebrate the film as definitively proving the inanity of the dichotomy between fiction and documentary. I tend to go for the latter."

"Well, obviously, I would have to say my dad’s movie, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is one of them, for sure. You know, I was lucky in that case not only to see the film and see the first movie where an overtly empowered black power character goes up against the system and survives. That was the first of its kind. But also to see my father insist on working with a multiracial crew. He had women on it, he had hippies on it, Hispanics, Asians, you know, and really bring all these folks together. That was super inspiring, to see that you could take sort of a multiracial, sometimes ragtag crew and make the first overtly revolutionary film in America and win and change the game. Because after that, Shaft came. Shaft was written for a white detective by a guy named Ernest Tidyman, and when my dad’s film Sweetback made money, they rewrote it with a black guy, and they got a young guy to do the music from Stax Records named Isaac Hayes. My dad, when he did Sweetback, had used Earth, Wind & Fire. So that was a super influential movie on me.Easy Rider was one I remember that just seemed to be the Peace and Freedom Party movement, in a way, reflected on screen. [Editor’s note: the Peace and Freedom Party was an organization founded in California in 1967 with the goal of ending the Vietnam War.]"