When I first saw Minari at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, I pretty much sobbed from start to finish. Granted the timing wasn’t great: three weeks before I flew out to Utah, my Grandma had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I hadn’t quite realised that watching a film about the relationship between a young boy and his maternal grandmother might be liable to emotionally devastate me. By the time the house lights came up and the cast and crew appeared for the post-film Q&A, I was a red-eyed, puffy-cheeked mess, and Lee Isaac Chung’s film had secured a place in my heart.
Just over a year later, plenty of things have changed, but Minari remains cemented in my heart and mind as something truly special. As such, we’re thrilled to present LWLies 88: The Minari issue. Being able to champion films that have resonated with us is one of the greatest joys of working in film criticism, and a lot of love and thought has gone into creating a magazine that feels as special and intimate as this semi-autobiographical film about Lee Isaac Chung’s childhood growing up on a farm in rural Arkansas.
In this issue
A review of Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari
Kambole Campbell delves into Lee Isaac Chung’s sun-bleached cine-memoir.
Being Yourself
Hannah Woodhead picks apart the themes of Minari with its director, Lee Isaac Chung, and two of its stars, Steven Yeun and Alan S Kim.
In Another Country: An A-Z of Diaspora on Screen
Leila Latif and David Jenkins offer an alphabetical tour of immigrant communities on film.
Flower Power
Phuong Le revisits the first US film to boast a fully-Asian cast: Henry Koster’s 1961 musical, Flower Drum Song.
Les Enfants Terribles
Charles Bramesco grinds his axe against the wheel of terrible child performances in movies.
Dimensions of Dialogue
Grace Barber-Plentie and Rōgan Graham explain how they amplified Black voices around the release of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series.
Threads: The Baseball Cap
Christina Newland’s regular column on clothes and film unloads the political weight of the baseball cap.
Illustration in this issue by Seung Won Chun, Callie Mastrianni, Stéphanie Sergeant, Lucia Vinti and Laurene Boglio.
David Fincher makes a spectacular return to feature filmmaking with this melancholy monochrome marvel.
Our latest issue is a tribute to the beautiful, unnerving world of Josephine Decker’s biopic that isn’t a biopic.
Our latest print edition brings together two of life’s foremost pleasures.
Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.
