15 AAPI Movies You Should Watch Now

Not just Crazy Rich Asians.

The first all-Asian major studio film came out in 1993 — that's younger than most of my editors.

It's been about one younger millennials' lifetime that Asian American actors had roles that didn't involve fake accents, kung fu, or dragon ladies, and only Gen Z'ers get to grow up with Asian American representation in media — though barely.

Asian American cinema is relatively new, but the past few years have the emergence of a growing tide of AAPI filmmakers and actors telling diverse stories.

Check out these AAPI films excelling in universal messages of love, duty, and how we are able (and unable) to forge our own path:

1. Minari

Melissa Lukenbaugh / © A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection

A Korean father moves his young family from California to his newly purchased 5 acres of Kansas farmland, where he (Jacob) and his wife (Monica) work sexing chicks at a hatchery. Jacob loves the land and dreams of being a successful farmer who supplies Korean grocers in the South. Monica moves her mother in from Korea, where she slowly connects with her grandson. The family struggles to stay together as the pitfalls of Jacob's American dream weigh heavier and heavier.

For him, the best thing he can do for his family is to have his children succeed on his terms. For Monica, the family needs ready access to medical care and community. She's frustrated: Why isn't their family enough for him? He's angry as the burden of his dream slowly crushes his shoulders. Director Lee Isaac Chung is confident in his vision and knows exactly what he's doing, capturing the quiet, contradictory, and beautifully ordinary conflicts of an immigrant family.

2. The Namesake

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Directed by renowned Indian American director Mira Nair in the 1990s, The Namesake follows an Indian American family from an arranged marriage in Kolkata to their first-generation progeny growing up in Massachusetts. Without a maternal grandfather to name their firstborn son in America, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli name him "Gogol" after Ashoke's favorite author, a name illustrating the confluences of circumstance and cultural conflict that mark his life. Kal Penn gives a natural performance as Gogol, but it is veteran Indian actors Irrfan Khan (Ashoke) and Tabu (Ashima) who steal the show at the beginning. The newlyweds slowly, shyly, fall in love, building the kind of quiet affection that is the most solid.

3. The Joy Luck Club

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Wayne Wang's landmark film, The Joy Luck Club (based on Amy Tan's novel), boasts many Hollywood firsts: the first movie to feature an all–Asian American cast, the first major studio film to center on an Asian American experience, the first Hollywood film to have Asian female protagonists who didn't say, "Love you long time" (I'm kidding...or am I?).

A group of aging Chinese ladies gather every week to play Mahjong, eat watermelon seeds, and connect about their past. Through a series of flashbacks and vignettes, the film explores the often-fraught relationship between three generations of mothers and daughters. As frequently as the four mother-daughter relationships clash through cultural misunderstanding and anxiety, the film also highlights the devotion and tenderness behind immigrants striving.

4. Mississippi Masala

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Mississippi Masala has everything you want from a romance: scenic southern drives, a gorgeous lady with great taste in music, and delicious, young Denzel Washington. In 1972, a third-generation Indian Ugandan family flee to Greenwood, Mississippi, during the country's forced removal of Asians. Daughter Mina (Sarita Choudhury) grows up to be a stunning, free-spirited young woman who rejects her father's pleas of education and upward mobility to run free and help the family business in rural Mississippi. She meet-cutes with cleaning-service owner Demetrius (Denzel Washington), and they fall in love. The local Indian community expresses disapproval of their relationship when the two are spotted on a romantic weekend trip in Biloxi.

Greenwood's Indian community boycotts Black businesses in retaliation, and tensions rise. Ultimately unable to reconcile the two communities, Demetrius and Mina flee west to California. Washington and Choudhury have great chemistry, and Mira Nair successfully conveys the sense of deep displacement that diasporic communities face, along with the sense of displacement rooted in American race relations.

5. The Farewell

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Billi, as played by Awkwafina, is a Chinese American writer struggling to make rent in New York City, and the movie opens on her receiving a rejection letter for her Guggenheim Fellowship application. She visits her family's house in Queens, and finds out her paternal grandmother is dying. The film's central conceit, based on Lulu Wang's real family, is about the family gathering from all corners of the globe around her grandmother to say goodbye, on the pretense of celebrating her cousin's wedding. Like Billi and many other immigrant kids, I was raised by my grandparents until the age of 5, when we moved to America. The familiar strains between parent and child in Asian immigrant families are often smoothed out by age, experience, and acceptance in the next generation — that's why grandparents often hold a special place in our hearts.

6. Bitter Melon

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Bitter Melon tackles the dark side of a Filipino American family in San Francisco. Declan, a young gay man, leaves New York to visit his Filipino American family for Christmas. Back home, his second-oldest brother, Troy, rules the house with fear, physically abusing his wife Shelly and emotionally abusing his daughter and mother. The movie culminates when Declan proposes to kill Troy. Director and screenwriter H.P. Mendoza noted in an interview that Bitter Melon is his "only screenplay that doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, and for good reason. It’s a movie about how men treat women.” Conversations in the film examine masculinity from various angles; from the perception of masculinity in the LGBTQ community to the toxic masculinity inherent in patriarchal societies.

7. Children of Invention

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Tze Chun's debut full-length film was shot in just 24 days and swept the indie awards circuit in 2010. The film, partly based on Chun's real childhood, opens on single mother and divorced immigrant Elaine Cheng struggling to bring up her two small children in the Boston suburbs. As she keeps cycling in and out of unsuccessful pyramid schemes, her two kids are forced to fend for themselves. One night, Elaine doesn't return. Since the little family's been living under the radar in an unfinished model apartment, Raymond and Tina are forced to figure out how to procure money and food on their own to avoid social services taking them away.

Children of Invention, like many immigrant stories, is partly about children struggling to survive on their own ingenuity and partly about the desperation of a dream that floats further and further away. While at times slightly disjointed, the film remains profoundly touching.

8. Better Luck Tomorrow

MTV Films / courtesy Everett Collection

Orange County Asian Americana John Hughes movie takes an abrupt turn into small-scale crime come-up Justin Lin's seething MTV debut. A group of angsty, overachieving Asian American high schoolers (exactly like the guys I grew up with) in a wealthy Orange County suburb are on the "right track" to building Ivy League applications and impressive high school resumes. But they also run a thriving black market selling cheat sheets and drugs and running receipt rackets. Better Luck Tomorrow is an early step towards moving away from the hyphen; while their families of origin hail from various Asian diasporas, they are more Orange County than Vu, Han, or Manibag — the group is known as the "Chinese mafia" to their diverse high school.

Praise for how willing Asian American people are to play by the rules is flipped on its head (their straight A's granting "passports to freedom"), as American ambition without morals culminates in a stunning crescendo of violence.

9. The Debut

Celestial Pictures / courtesy Everett Collection

The Debut is another film portraying John Hughes-esque themes of high school romance and family conflict through an immigrant lens, joining a group of films that as Roger Ebert said, "about second-generation immigrants, standing between the traditions of their parents and their own headlong dive into American culture." High school senior Ben Mercado (Dante Basco) is a talented artist who strives for his own path, while his Filipino parents have sacrificed much for him to find stability.

Everything comes to a head at Ben's sister's 18th birthday party (a Filipino tradition known as a debut), where Ben is forced to consider his cultural identity and family tensions boil over. First-time Filipino director Gene Cajayon brings fresh energy to a tale familiar to, as I call myself, "more difficult immigrant children."

10. Tigertail

Chen Hsiang Liu / © Netflix / Courtesy Everett Collection

Oh, the archetypal hard-working, stern-faced Asian immigrant parent, so quick to admonish and so slow to smile. Before their dreams were deferred onto their children and they started haggling over every cent that could be spent on an engineering degree, they were young once — they danced, laughed, loved, and played pranks. When the movie opens on the father Pin-Jui's early Taiwan scenes, he is foolish and in love. Devoted to his mother, who he works with in an unsafe factory, he woos a childhood sweetheart from a better-off family. When his mother gets into an accident at the factory, Pin-Jui takes up the factory manager's offer to go to America in exchange for marrying their daughter.

Based loosely on his own family, Yang's film takes us through the little things immigrants are forced to give up, as Pin-Jui and his wife build their lives from a dingy Bronx apartment and their firstborn child, Angela, takes on many of her father's silent burdens and resentments. Critics have said that it lacks "a clear representation of the pain that such sacrifice imparts on the next generation, unless of course you’ve witnessed it for yourself." Perhaps Mr. Peter Debruge lacks a clear representation of empathy, unless of course he's witnessed the pain for himself.

11. Searching

Sebastian Baron / © Screen Gems / Courtesy Everett Collection

Searching takes the meta-trope of filming through alternative screens (shot through iPhones, computers, etc.) to the next level. David Kim (John Cho) grows increasingly desperate as his 16-year-old daughter, Margot, vanishes after her piano lesson. He tracks her down through her laptop on a thrilling, frustrating hunt that unearths many secrets, showing how technology can bring us together as well as deepen divides.

12. Shanghai Noon

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Shanghai Noon may not make many indie arts critics lists, but this blockbuster, starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson, is a surprisingly progressive, heartwarming Western featuring kidnapped princesses, gallant heroes (of all shades and genders), and plenty of fight scenes and shootouts. Jackie Chan stars as a lowly imperial guard (Chon Wang) with a quest to rescue Princess Pei Pei, who has been kidnapped by an evil Chinese warlord in Carson City, Nevada. Chon Wang gets separated from his fellow rescuers during a train heist with the most inept and lucky robber in the world — Roy O'Bannon (Owen Wilson).

The movie manages to flip Western stereotypes on its head, and the humor is strikingly smart for a major action film probably pitched as "Wild West Rush Hour"; the beautiful Native American princess saves the day multiple time as an accomplished cowgirl, Chon Wang becomes the inspiration for "John Wayne," and Native American elders are not all-knowing mysterious beings but weed smokers who like having fun with their strange new fighter. Race relations are depicted in a period-appropriate (albeit funny manner), and we see imperial guards carrying millions in gold being relegated to the livestock carrier, Chon Wang being shot at for being "injun," and Roy O'Bannon dismissing his friend as a "Chinaman."

The film also toys with broad themes of individualism versus conformity and following your heart or respecting tradition. Here's a film that's as action-packed and smart as it is innocent and heartwarming.

13. Spa Night

© Strand Releasing / Courtesy Everett Collection

Eighteen-year-old David lives in Koreatown with his financially struggling parents. His grades are subpar, and he shows little aptitude in school, despite his parents pushing for a college scholarship. When he gets a job at a Korean spa, his sexuality is stirred by constantly witnessing the customers' covert gay trysts. While sexuality haunts Spa Night as an omnipresent force, the coming-of-age movie's driving force is David's intimate relationship with his parents. Director Andrew Ahn gives us an intimate look into David's tight-knit, conservative family and his desperation to please his parents.

14. Enter the Dragon

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Perhaps the most well-known movie of the '70s, and certainly the most well-known Asian crossover movie of all time, Enter the Dragon turned martial arts legend Bruce Lee from an oft-overlooked star into an international icon after the film's posthumous release. The premise is simple: Three of the best martial artists in the world (Black, white, and Asian) are invited to a tournament on a Bond-esque villain's island, where girls have been disappearing. Sparking a whirlwind of fandom, knockoffs, and Blaxploitation films, Enter the Dragon is a Hollywood lesson in style and intensity.

15. Columbus

Elisa Christian / © Superlative Films  / Courtesy Everett Collection

Columbus, Indiana, according to debut director Kogonada, is known for two things: meth and modernism. These two forces shape and propel the dreams and lives of the film's characters. Jin (John Cho) arrives from South Korea to take over his estranged father, an architect who lays in a coma at a local hospital. Jin meets Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a young library worker, who gave up her dream of working in the architecture industry to take care of her meth-addicted mother. They quickly bond and wander around Columbus discussing architecture. Their paths switch as Jin stays behind to watch over his dying father and Casey leaves Columbus to pursue her own dreams.

Cho and Richardson offer a natural rapport that drives the movie forward, and Kogonada makes every shot a masterpiece of visual framing — even in moments of extreme sadness, there's beauty surrounding them.

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BuzzFeed / Kathy Hoang