Wayne Wang’s Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, the filmmaker’s follow-up to his existential noir riff Chan Is Missing, again focuses explicitly on the Chinese American community in San Francisco. But where his debut feature found its protagonists constantly scrambling about the city, Dim Sum is set almost exclusively within, or just outside, the domestic space. Echoes of Ozu Yasujirō, specifically Late Spring, ring throughout Wang’s melodrama, whose tender, empathetic, and often funny examination of a loving, codependent mother-daughter relationship is reminiscent of Ryū Chishū and Haru Setsuko’s characters’ in Ozu’s masterwork.

Dim Sum, too, is a film of extended silences and often mundane conversations, and of emotions coursing beneath placid surfaces across settings where old customs collide with new ones. Wang makes evocative use of Ozu’s signature pillow shots throughout, reflecting elements of a Chinese community through shots of Chinatown and its...