Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

The Farewell

Lulu Wang’s second feature film, her first in five years, is a wonderful character study exposing American audiences to the cultural dynamics that exist in China and how different they are from Western traditions.

Awkwafina delivers a strong performance as a young Chinese-American artist who learns that her grandmother is dying, but that her family has decided not to tell her so that she can live a fuller and longer life. As Awkwafina’s Billi returns to China to spend as much time as she can with her Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhao), she struggles with her desire to tell her grandmother the situation, while adhering to the cultural mores that make it difficult to do so.

While the film ends on a hopeful, but low-key note, we’re left to experience the wonderful, full narrative that is modestly reminiscent of what Wayne Wang did with The Joy Luck Club in 1993. Zhao is wonderful as is the rest of the cast, though Awkwafina shows us that she’s not just the manic character she’s played previously in films like Crazy Rich Asians. It’s a film worth watching just to get a better understanding of the subtle, but potent differences between myriad cultures around the world.

Hustlers

The second-best film I saw this week was directed by Lorene Scafaria in her third cinematic outing as a director after 2012’s Seeking a Friend for the End of the World and 2015’s The Meddler. Both of those films had mediocre receptions, but this time out, she’s finally hit the nail on the head with a film that speaks volumes about modern women’s issues.

Situated around the framing device of a female reporter (Julia Stiles) asking Destiny (Constance Wu), a former stripper, about the incidents that surrounded her life of crime years earlier. Destiny doesn’t have a lot of options, so she goes to work as a stripper in order to support her ailing mother. As she tries to get the hang of the power structures and opportunities surrounding her new career, she befriends an experienced fellow dancer named Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) who guides her through the rigors of stripping life and later pulls her into the criminal enterprise at the heart of the film.

A bevy of terrific actors give Hustlers a solid foundation in reality with Wu clearly standing at the head of the pack with the likes of Lopez, Stiles, Lili Reinhardt, and Mercedes Ruehl all giving strong performances. What the film has to say about working women and the struggles they face not just from the world outside, but within the stripping community as well with male-dominated culture creating the biggest roadblocks. The film has a great deal to say to those who are receptive to its themes.

Judy

A career-defining performance from Renée Zellweger gives Judy a firm central pillar around which to build the story of the late Judy Garland’s last days in England prior to her death in 1969.

Struggling financially after her ex-husband helped drain her bank account, Garland tries to fund other revenue streams or risk the loss of custody of her two younger children. With a brief appearance of her older daughter Liza Minnelli, the film focuses on the ugly history of Hollywood where the young starlet was perpetually forced to adhere to expected standards, including diet and recreational activities. As we see the struggles she faced growing up, her later-life troubles gain new perspective as Zellweger skillfully navigates through the crumbling emotional state of one of cinema history’s most perky performers.

The film surrounding Zellweger’s performance is standard fare with the expected rises and falls in action punctuated by long periods of superfluous material that keeps the film from feeling a bit uneven. Zellweger is surrounding by solid performers who aren’t working quite to her level including Rufus Sewell as her ex-husband Sidney Luft, Finn Wittrock as an opportunistic musician, Jessie Buckley as her London-based handler, and Michael Gambon as her employer. While the film successfully exposes the warts of Hollywood life in the 1930s, it does so in a rather conventional and uninspired way at times. Even the “Over the Rainbow” sequence is predictably executed, which gives the film little to discover other than Zellweger’s stellar performance.

Knives Out

As a big fan of murder mysteries, I wanted to like Knives Out so much more than I did. With hints of Agatha Christie at the heart of its plotting, and references to noted murder mysteries like Clue, Murder, She Wrote, and Sherlock Holmes, what unspools in Knives Out is a conventional whodunit that thinks it’s far cleverer than it is and never goes to the insane lengths it could have and still ended up as a zany murder mystery comedy, something that hasn’t been done entirely successfully since the aforementioned Clue.

Daniel Craig takes the lead as Benoit Blanc, a southern simulacrum of Christie’s foremost detective Hercule Poirot, a renowned detective who’s even referenced as being familiar to the cast on multiple occasions early in the film as the various stories are revealed by the family members of the late mystery writer Harlan Thrombley (Christopher Plummer) who has been murdered. A superb cast of characters including Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, LaKeith Stanfield, Katherine Langford, Jaeden Martell, Riki Lindhome, Edi Patterson, Frank Oz, K Callan, Noah Segan, M. Emmet Walsh, and Marlene Forte surround the film.

With a great murder mystery, a twist is all but required with the first person suspected of a crime rarely having done it; however, as the film progresses, the various motives for murder unwind in a modestly amusing way as this out of touch wealthy family jockeys for position while the unsuspecting nurse stands to inherit everything simply by being kind. The political aspects of the film are both pointed and obvious. It’s a film where the conclusion is notably less interesting than the one you can craft in your head from various clues peppered throughout the screenplay. This is a film that Agatha Christie would never have written simply because the trajectory is all too formulaic and the unraveling of the mystery far too circumspect.