11 of the Best Chinese Movies

With Chinese New Year approaching, The Skinny's Film team put their heads together to choose their best Chinese movies. Have a look at our choices below and let us know if you agree

Feature by Film Team | 02 Feb 2016

24 City (2008)

Dir: Jia Zhangke

While many of Jia Zhangke’s modern classics have managed to provoke the Chinese ruling party, 24 City pissed off the cinematic purists too. Its backdrop is the vast hulking metaphor of a decommissioned munitions factory being demolish. The rusting, dilapidated body of China’s communist past is deconstructed piece by piece as the lives fed into its meat grinder are laid bare in ‘straight to camera’ confessionals. These are a mixture of true and scripted tales, trained actors among everyday people.

This blend of documentary and constructed drama meant that the film angered some early festival audiences – perhaps uneasy at being so emotionally manipulated by mere performances. While most are tragic or melancholic personal histories, the final section looks forward. For a young lady Su Na (the director’s wife and muse Zhao Tao), the collectivism of her parent’s generation grows ever smaller in the rear mirror, as she speeds towards the vapid, material riches of capitalism. [Alan Bett]

Black Snow (1990)

Dir: Xie Fei

The class and subtlety of realist master Xie Fie’s work means he often slips under the radar compared to the more famous Fifth Generation directors. This measured 1990 take on a troubled life and China's most truculent political period remains a beautiful and interesting wallflower.

Black Snow – so aptly titled – is the tale of a young but hardened ex-con (a strong yet vulnerable Jiang Wen) left unschooled as a result of the Cultural Revolution. Although living in China’s capital, Beijing, he remains on the periphery of a society keen to close its doors to him. For aesthetes, the work offers an impeccable visual narrative, from the opening hand-held shot following Wen through his cramped Hutong to the focusing in on an escaped prisoner, telling his story as Wen (off-screen) puffs smoke across the frame like dragon’s breath. Later, two cigarette embers burn in the all-encompassing darkness. [AB]

A Bright Summer Day (1991)

Dir: Edward Yang

Like all great films addressing the state of a nation – in this case 1960s Taiwan, its complex relationship with mainland China and the growing influence of American culture on the island – A Bright Summer Day does so tangentially. The central focus in this spralling coming of age tale is a bright, middle-class teen (Chang Chen) who, over the course of a year, finds himself mixed up in love, death and gang life on the streets of Taipei.

It’s strange that Edward Yang’s films should remain the least well known and hardest to see of the great Taiwanese new wave triumvirate – Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang being Yang's more celebrated contemporaries – as his half dozen features are the more accessible. They’re deceptively simple films that build incrementally, their larger themes emerging through small details and nuanced performances. A Bright Summer Day is both intimate and epic: all of life is in this picture. [Jamie Dunn]

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2001)

Dir: Ang Lee

Its place as the pinnacle of wuxi cinema is reason enough for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to go down in history. Ang Lee’s ravishing epic brought the genre to a slack-jawed international audience but it is equally as impressive for how the director utilised his surroundings to such startling effect – not unlike the duelling martial artists of his story.

Lee glides through the expectations of wuxia using his perfectly choreographed action to convey meaning, character and narrative, as well as to thrill and delight the baying crowds. There are few scenes in modern cinema as iconic as the final showdown among the bamboo, but it is the emotional narratives that really drive home its status – particularly in the relationship between the two titans Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeo. This is sword fights and romance on as grand a scale as you’ll see. [Ben Nicholson]

Election (2005); Election 2 (2006)

Dir: Johnnie To

Taken together, Hong Kong director Johnnie To’s Election and Election 2 exist as a masterfully crafted counterpoint to the typically grandiose, mythic organised crime saga. The films span a four-year period and chronicle the battles for the chairmanship of a powerful Hong Kong triad over two bloody election cycles. To is known for his impeccably composed genre films but here his filmmaking also takes on a political dimension as he explores mainland China’s mounting influence within Hong Kong and the modern tension between tradition and huge profits.

Rather than fetishize the rituals and violence of the triad structure, To presents a criminal society loosely held together by sloppy, shortsighted individuals who are motivated by blind greed. This is a virtuoso director, at the peak of his formal powers, working with rich material to create a pair of films that manage to shatter the noble-gangster mythos, while still remaining fiendishly entertaining. [Tom Grieve]

Read out interview with Johnnie To

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The Goddess (1934)

Dir: Wu Yonggang

Written and directed by 27-year-old Wu Yonggang, The Goddess is undoubtedly the most remarkable film to come out of China’s cinematic Golden Age. Chinese silent film icon Ruan Lingyu stars in her most iconic role as the young, single mother who is driven to prostitution (the title being an old Chinese euphemism) to support herself and provide for her young son. Ruan’s wounded beauty dominates the film as she tries to retain a measure of dignity in the face of social injustice and personal cruelty, with her naturalistic performance conveying sorrow and exhaustion with a deftness that makes other silent film actors look histrionic by comparison. Decades later it remains a startling and heart-wrenching experience. [Michael Jaconelli]

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2005)

Dir: Tsai Ming-liang

Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn is perhaps the closest any filmmaker has come to understanding the allure of the communal cinema experience. Set within a dilapidated picture house, which is due to close the following day, it observes the weird and wonderful encounters of the theatre’s patrons. The film being screened is King Hu's Dragon Inn, and as the 1960s wuxai classic plays out in the background we begin to realise the audience aren’t interacting with each other, but with the theatre's various ghosts.

Tsai presents the moviegoing experience as a subjective one, with the cinema a place of solitude and isolated contemplation. This sense of alienation has permeated much of Tsai’s work, be it exploring Taiwan’s identity crisis or the plight of China’s migrant workers, but here the richness of his conception is far more universal, culminating in a nostalgic paen to the transcendental qualities of cinema. [Patrick Gamble]

In the Mood for Love (2000)

Dir: Wong Kar-wai

In Wong Kar-wai’s gorgeous chamber piece we follow two neighbours, played by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, who are drawn together in the vacuum left by their empty marriages. Tentatively, they begin a not-quite-love affair of potent glances and erroticly charged conversations. Perhaps inspired by his protagonists, this is one of Wong’s most restrained films. The kinetic rush of Chungking Express and Fallen Angels has been replaced by mesmerising slowmo vignettes that seem like snatches of memories or half-remembered dreams.

The whole film functions in this heady state. The primary setting is in and around a threadbare boarding house in 1960s Hong Kong, but cinematographer Christopher Doyle and Mark Li Ping-bin (who replaced Doyle when the shoot overran) give every frame a romantic glow; the sense of time and place is vivid, but it’s covered in a nostalgic gauze. Like Brief Encounter, the power and tragedy of the film comes from the fact the relationship remains chaste. But that doesn’t mean there’s no heat – this is cinema at its most sizzling. [JD]

Read out interview with In the Mood for Love's cinematographer, Christopher Doyle

Red Sorghum (1987)

Dir: Zhang Yimou

Zhang Yimou’s debut, Red Sorghum, based on Mo Yan’s novel about a young woman’s life running a sorghum liquor distillery during the invasion of the Japanese imperial army, won the Golden Bear in Berlin and helped bring Chinese cinema to the attention of Western audiences. Zhang’s fellow Fifth Generation directors, the first post-Cultural Revolution graduates of the Beijing Film Academy, would become known for their work's intriguing mix of ambivalent nationalism and intelligent blend of metaphor and parable.

Ostensibly a state-funded celebration of the collective will of Maoism and how China resisted the Japanese invasion, Zhang’s subversive visual language presents Mo’s story as an pre-revolutionary allegory for China’s post-revolutionary climate. A former cinematographer, Zhang’s deep understanding of the camera’s ability to articulate the unspeakable culminates in a barbaric, yet beautifully textured folk-tale about love, collectivism and the indefatigable spirit of a nation. [PG]

Spring in a Small Town (1948)

Dir: Fei Mu

Often cited as China's greatest ever film, Spring in a Small Town is worthy of such accolades. The nation’s cinema often bursts to life at the intersection of obligation and desire, and Fei Mu’s brooding melodrama is the epitome of that tradition. Adopting the unconventional technique of dissolving between shots within scenes – rather than in between them – the film creates a stifling and claustrophobic sense of time at a crawl as it echoes the anxieties of the late 1940s China through buttoned-down longing. As the young, lonely wife at the heart of the story, Wei Wei is an exemplar of this buttoned-down longing, giving a performance that both resembles the austerity of old-fashioned acting while brilliantly using it to accentuate the dutiful rigidity of her character. [BN]

Read our review of Spring in a Small Town's Blu-ray release

A Touch of Zen (1971)

Dir: King Hu

King Hu’s labyrinthine wuxia epic stands at the pinnacle of the genre. It is the story of a young painter who discovers a mysterious woman hiding in an abandoned fortress from the sinister Imperial Eunuch and his East Chamber Guards who tortured and killed her father. As the film deftly weaves through various genres – ghost story, political thriller, philosophical action movie – Hu’s entrancing cinematography washes over you making use of recurring visual motifs such as snarled cobwebs, dark tranquil forests and blinding sunlight to create a visual experience like few others. Fights eschew music and are instead choreographed to the rustle of the participant’s clothes and the clink of their weaponry. By stepping beyond the confines of the wuxia genre and focusing on his characters' quest for enlightenment in a corrupt and chaotic world, Hu’s film addresses the commonality of the human experience. [MJ]

Read our review of A Touch of Zen's Blu-ray release