"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."