20 Best Movies Of 2019

15. The Farewell

You really have to appreciate a good old-fashioned tear-jerker and few films this years jerked quite so hard and quite so successfully as writer-director Lulu Wang’s The Farewell.

Starring Awkwafina (an actress sharply on the rise at the minute and destined for even more), it saw a young woman return to China to visit her gravely ill grandmother. That in itself would be sad enough, but the film is basically about the family attempting to keep the grandmother's cancer diagnosis secret from her. It's about all sorts of lies around that and how they bring families together and it's often as joyous as it is devastating.

If movies are to be judged on what they make you feel (I say this a lot, for good reason), then not many come better recommended than The Farewell.