The Joy Luck Club

In San Francisco, four Chinese immigrant women have played mahjong together for years. After one of them dies, her daughter takes her place at the table, and the lives the mothers left behind in China open up one by one. Four mothers, four daughters, eight interlocking stories. The subject is not immigration but the gap between the lesson the mothers try to pass on and the lesson the daughters receive. The mothers are hard on their daughters in order to protect them; the daughters read that as a lack of love. Each section repeats the same misunderstanding in another generation. The form is built on flashback and moves fast; eight stories fit into two hours, so some sections are dense and cramped. The source is Amy Tan's 1989 novel, and Tan co-wrote the screenplay with Ronald Bass. This was one of the first major films made inside the Hollywood studio system with an almost entirely Asian cast, and it took more than twenty-five years for a second example at that scale to arrive. Wayne Wang directs. Tsai Chin, Kieu Chinh and Lisa Lu play some of the mothers. Who it is for: viewers who like family drama and stories across generations. Who it is not for: anyone wary of emotional intensity; the film holds the same pitch through all eight stories and leaves no room to breathe.