Minari
Lee Isaac Chung’s “Minari” casts a spell from its opening moments, a Terrence Malick-like evocation of human beings trying to stay in harmony with the natural world. As a family car travels through a green American landscape, the earth itself seems to be speaking to the characters, and through them, to us. 

It is a classic immigrant story with specific, often unique new details. A Korean American family headed by a father, Jacob (Steven Yeun) and mother Monica (Yeri Han), came from Korea in the 1980s and spent time in California working as chicken sexers, separating baby chicks by gender. Now they have moved with their two American-born children, a serious and mature girl named Anne (Noel Kate Cho) and a six-year-old named David (newcomer Alan S. Kim), hoping to start a 50-acre farm in a small Arkansas town. 

The supporting characters are vividly drawn. The great American character actor Will Patton is superb as an evangelical Christian farmer who praises Jesus every minute and is glimpsed in one scene carrying a big wooden cross on his back as he walks along the country road. (Jacob asks if he wants a ride and he says no, he’s got this.) But the best performance belongs to Yuh-Jung Youn as Soonja, Jacob’s grandmother, who is brought in from the old country to provide advice and childcare help. She is a live wire—a cosmopolitan who always speaks her mind and is at ease with profanity, practical joking, and making moral/ethical decisions that could have major repercussions without consulting Jacob or Monica. (When Monica puts a $100 bill in the church collection plate, presumably to make a big impression during their first visit, grandma deftly removes it).

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