"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."

"And the rest of the films in John Cassavetes: Five Films. Not one film but five, which already takes me over my Ten Best quota. Pick any of these films and meditate on performance, what makes it and what sustains it. If there is a choice to make I would opt for Faces and for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Godard, who admired the latter, compared it to listening to a piano player tickling a few last chords on the ivories in the wee hours of the morning, when the last patrons have left the nightclub and the waiters are stacking the chairs on the tables . . . Not a bad comparison, all in all). Looking at a Cassavetes movie should persuade any viewer that there are no bad actors but only bad directors, and that acting has more to do with the strategic setting of gestures in space than it has to do with a trip to the flea market of emotions. The miracle of Cassavetes’s craft lies in that he makes the emotion surge, while obstinately refusing to illustrate it. No wonder his actors look always as if they were documented. Look at the bodies of Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel, and Peter Falk: they are all avatars of Lillian Gish, the rightful inheritors of that magic moment in Broken Blossoms when with her fingers she creased a smile on her terrified face and invented film acting."