The Farewell was a breakout hit at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival from Asian-American director Lulu Wang that became a critical and box-office hit when it was released theatrically later in the year.

Based on a story Wang has been telling since 2012, the semiautobiographical film is about a young Chinese-American woman (Awkwafina) who, along with her parents and other relatives, visits her dying paternal grandmother in China. Billed as a comedy-drama, the story revolves around the family not telling the grandmother that she is dying. That alone makes calling the film a comedy a bit of a stretch. I think it would be better described as a drama with comedic moments.

Awkwafina, best known for her supporting performance in last year’s Crazy Rich Asians, plays the central character as an enterprising young woman but the screenplay doesn’t allow her to do much more than mope around throughout the film. Shuzhen Zhao who plays the grandmother as a sweet old lady is livelier but neither the characters nor the women who inhabit them come across as particularly interesting. The only character in the entire film that has much of a personality is Chinese-Australian actress Diana Lin as Awkwafina’s thoroughly Americanized mother. She has the film’s best line: “These people are ridiculous. They even hire people to cry at their funerals.”

A pleasant little film, it is considered by some as a possible Oscar nominee for Best Picture, Actress, Supporting Actress (Zhao, not Lin), and Directing.

The Farewell is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Bart Freundlich’s After the Wedding is a remake of Susanne Bier’s 2006 Danish film of the same name which was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film, losing to Germany’s The Lives of Others.

Both versions of the story begin and end in India where the protagonist runs a home and school for orphans in desperate need of money. Help awaits in the protagonist’s home country, Denmark in the original, the U.S. (New York City to be precise) in the remake. There a rich benefactor awaits, mulling over how much to provide with time out for a family wedding after which lives will be forever changed. The difference between the two versions is that in the original, the two main characters are men, in the remake they are women.

The change in the gender of the characters works to the advantage of the two actresses who play them – Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore.

Williams’ performance is on a par with some of her best including those in Blue Valentine and Manchester by the Sea while Moore, too, evokes memories of her best work in The End of the Affair and Far from Heaven. Billy Crudup, playing Moore’s husband and an old flame of Williams, is the man in the middle.

After the Wedding is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Arrow Academy has released Anthony Mann’s 1955 film The Far Country on Blu-ray. The last of the films Mann made with James Stewart at Universal, it is classified as a western even though it takes place mostly in the Klondike region of Canada’s Yukon during the Gold Rush.

Stewart plays one of his coldest characters here, a cattle driver who stands by while ruthless frontier judge John McIntire murders good men until he kills Stewart’s partner Walter Brennan and injures Stewart in the process. Ruth Roman, Corinne Calvet, and Jay C. Flippen co-star.

This may be the least of the westerns that Stewart and Mann made at Universal, though it’s better than the 1953 oil rig adventure Thunder Bay. It is not, however, as good as 1950’s Winchester ’73, 1952’s Bend of the River, or 1953’s The Naked Spur. Nor is it as good as 1955’s The Man from Laramie made at Columbia before they went their separate ways.

Kino Lorber has released the controversial 1979 film Winter Kills on Blu-ray along with three Don Siegel films made between 1958 and 1973.

Winter Kills was the feature film debut of documentary filmmaker William Richert from the novel by Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate). Classified as a comedy, few laughed then or now, but the 4K restoration does spiff it up considerably.

The Blu-ray imports all the extras from the old Anchor Bay DVD including Richert’s informative commentary and several reunion documentaries featuring Richert and the film’s star, Jeff Bridges.

Bridges plays the brother of an assassinated U.S. President played by former Virginia senator John Warner then married to Elizabeth Taylor who plays the mistress of both the president and a Mafia boss. John Huston is Bridges’ father whose offices are in New York’s Pan Am Building where John F. Kennedy’s father had his offices. Others making brief appearances include Anthony Perkins, Toshiro Mifune, Sterling Hayden, Eli Wallach, Dorothy Malone, Tomas Milian, Ralph Meeker, and Richard Boone. The outrageous ending is something you will never forget.

Don Siegl’s 1958 film The Gun Runners is the third film adapted from Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not following Howards Hawks’ 1944 film called To Have and Have Not and Michael Curtiz’s 1950 film The Breaking Point, which is said to be the most faithful of the three adaptations.

Audie Murphy has the role previously played by Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield, and it is, as it was for his predecessors, one of the best roles of his career. Eddie Albert, Patricia Owens, Everett Sloane, and Richard Jaeckel co-star.

Siegel’s 1968 film Madigan and his 1973 film Charley Varrick are classics about men on different sides of the law on opposite sides of the U.S. Richard Widmark is the streetwise detective in the New York-set Madigan while Walter Matthau is the career criminal in the San Francisco-set Charley Varrick, Both are excellent examples of the crime genre and come with extras galore including a three-man commentary on the former.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray releases of Cold War and The Fan.