Film critic Justin Chang reviews 'The Farewell' the second feature by the Chinese-American writer director Lulu Wang. It tells a story from her own family's experience about a young woman who travels to China to pay a final visit to her grandmother, who has no idea that she has only a few months to live.
In the viscerally unnerving films of Ari Aster, there's nothing more horrific than the reality of human grief. His haunted-house thriller, Hereditary, followed a family rocked by traumas so devastating that the eventual scenes of devil-worshipping naked boogeymen almost came as a relief. Aster's new movie, Midsommar, doesn't pack quite as terrifying a knockout punch, but it casts its own weirdly hypnotic spell. This is a slow-burning and deeply absorbing piece of filmmaking, full of strikingly beautiful images and driven less by shocks than ideas.