A town in Fengjie county is gradually being demolished and flooded to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A man and woman visit the town to locate their estranged spouses, and become witness to the societal changes.
During the Cultural Revolution, two young men are sent to a remote mining village where they fall in love with the local tailor's beautiful granddaughter and discover a suitcase full of forbidden Western novels.
During World War II, a secret agent must seduce and assassinate an official who works for the Japanese puppet government in Shanghai.
The film follows Mr. Shi, a retired widower from Beijing. When his only daughter, Yilan, who lives in Spokane, Washington and works as a librarian, gets divorced, he decides to visit her to help her heal. However, Yilan is not interested. She tries keeping an emotional distance but when this finally fails she begins physically avoiding her father. He confronts her about an affair with a married Russian man and she, in turn, lets loose about all the gossip she'd heard as a young girl about his alleged affair with a female colleague back in China.
Two former cops start investigating the series of murders that tanked their careers when the killings begin again.
A Korean TV anchor goes to China to do a story on an ancient artifact. When she falls for the object's owner, she dreads revealing the truth to him.
Hector is a quirky psychiatrist who has become increasingly tired of his humdrum life. As he tells his girlfriend, Clara, he feels like a fraud: he hasn’t really tasted life, and yet he’s offering advice to patients who are just not getting any happier. So Hector decides to break out of his deluded and routine driven life. Armed with buckets of courage and child-like curiosity, he embarks on a global quest in hopes of uncovering the elusive secret formula for true happiness. And so begins a larger than life adventure with riotously funny results.
In 1980, Xu Jingshan, a wealthy Chinese-American businessman returns to China to find his son, Xu Lingjun, whom he had abandoned over 30 years earlier. Labeled a rightist because of his capitalist father, Lingjun has been forced to live as a humble herdsman on the grasslands. His bitter life has been transformed by a happy marriage to the wise and beautiful Xiuzhi, and more recently by his rehabilitation by the Party. When he goes to Beijing for their reunion, he discovers his father wants him to work for his chemical company in San Francisco. Lingjun tells the story of his life to his father, as he ponders his future.
To put her younger sister Huilan (Margaret Tu Chuan) through college, Huilian (Grace Ting Ning) became a taxi dancer and is despised by Huilan. Now married to a good husband (Guan Shan), the lonely Huilan falls for a man after her money. To protect her younger sister, Huilian puts herself at risk. Grace Ting Ning plays a sad role, as the noble sister who keeps her purity in a cesspool.
The film is a powerful condemnation of the political radicalism of the Cultural Revolution and shows how ordinary people were victimized during a decade of turmoil.
Engineer Jake Holman arrives aboard the gunboat USS San Pablo, assigned to patrol a tributary of the Yangtze in the middle of exploited and revolution-torn 1926 China. His iconoclasm and cynical nature soon clash with the 'rice-bowl' system which runs the ship and the uneasy symbiosis between Chinese and foreigner on the river. Hostility towards the gunboat's presence reaches a climax when the boat must crash through a river-boom and rescue missionaries upriver at China Light Mission.
A true-story account of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.
In an epic tale of theater, gender, love and class, two Beijing opera actors navigate political turmoil as their friendship evolves over decades.
A biplane pilot is saddled with a spoiled industrialist's daughter on a search for her missing father through Asia that eventually involves them in a struggle against a Chinese warlord.
Set in China's underworld, this tale of love and betrayal follows a dancer who fired a gun to protect her mobster boyfriend during a fight. On release from prison 5 years later, she sets out to find him.
Tian Zhenhua arrives in Shanghai to coach a local women's basketball team. Number 5 on the team, Xiaoje, excels at basketball but is unsure of whether to continue playing. As Tian gets to grips with training Xiaoje and the rest of the team, he reflects on his career as a star basketball player before the revolution.
Wang Bianlian is an aging street performer known as the King of Mask for his mastery of Sichuan Change Art in a true story. His wife left him with and infant son over 30 years ago. The son died from illness at age 10. This left Wang a melancholy loner aching for a male descendent to learn his rare and dying art.
Two Chinese miners, who make money by killing fellow miners and then extorting money from the mine owner to keep quiet about the "accident", happen upon their latest victim. But one of them begins to have second thoughts.
Seven-year-old Kayla's father dies unexpectedly on a mission in the U.S which changes Kayla's life completely. She takes on the responsibility of her broken family. She inspires the people around her with love and singing. And in the end, she manages to carve out a happy life.
Prompted by the death of his father and the grief of his mother, a man recalls the story of how they met in flashback.