‘The Joy Luck Club’

In an age of contrived sentimentality, director Wayne Wang and Amy Tan’s 1993 film from Tan’s best-selling novel offers straight-from-the-heart emotions. A story of distance and how to bridge it, of painful gaps between immigrant mothers and U.S.-born children, it has the strength and clarity of its source. While their names are largely unfamiliar to general audiences, the eight actresses who play the film’s four pairs of mothers and daughters are not only the pick of several generations of acting talent but also women who understand these characters from inside out. Pictured is Kieu Chinh, who plays a woman who must abandon her infant daughters while escaping war-torn China (TMC Monday at 9 p.m.).