Hero (2002), Shanghai Triad (1995), The Road Home (1999), To Live (1994), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), Ying xiong (2002), Wo de fu qin mu qin (1999), Ju Dou (1990) ... Let's take a look at the ranked list of the best Zhang Yimou movies.
Storyline: Flashbacks reveal how a warrior (Jet Li) stopped the elusive assassins (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) who tried to kill the emperor of China.
Plot Keywords: action, drama, historical, romance, war, artistic, philosophical ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Director Zhang Yimou's tale of a Chinese boy's eye-opening experiences during a week in the realm of organized crime.
Plot Keywords: crime, drama, gangster, 1930s, zhang yimou, chinese cinema, violence ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: A Chinese businessman (Honglei Sun) recalls the story of the courtship of his mother (Ziyi Zhang) and father (Yulian Zhao), on the occasion of the old man's death.
Plot Keywords: romance, rural, nostalgia, chinese cinema, zhang yimou, drama, family ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Fugui and Jiazhen endure tumultuous events in China as their personal fortunes move from wealthy landownership to peasantry. Addicted to gambling, Fugui loses everything. In the years that follow he is pressed into both the nationalist and communist armies, while Jiazhen is forced into menial work. They raise a family and survive, managing "to live" from the 40's to the 70's in this epic, but personal, story of life through an amazing period.
Plot Keywords: drama, history, family, society, politics, china, cultural revolution ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: China in the 1920's. After her father's death, nineteen year old Songlian is forced to marry Chen Zuoqian, the lord of a powerful family. Fifty year old Chen has already three wives, each of them living in separate houses within the great castle. The competition between the wives is tough, as their master's attention carries power, status and privilege. Each night Chen must decide with which wife to spend the night and a red lantern is lit in front of the house of his choice. And each wife schemes and plots to make sure it's hers. However, things get out of hand...
Plot Keywords: drama, historical, family, china, zhang yimou, power struggle, tragedy ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Ancient China and the Qin Empire is out to conquer the six kingdoms. This makes its king a target for assassination. However, one man has single-handedly ensured the safety of the king, by killing the three most notorious assassins in the land. Treated as a hero, he is summoned for an audience with the king.
Plot Keywords: martial arts, action, drama, historical, war, romance, adventure ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: City businessman Luo Yusheng returns to his home village in North China for the funeral of his father, the village teacher. He finds his elderly mother insisting that all the traditional burial customs be observed, despite the fact that times have changed so much, and that it involves many people carrying his father's body back to the village - the road home. As Yusheng debates the complications involved in organising such a big feat, he remembers the magical story of how his father and mother first met and got together.
Plot Keywords: drama, romance, family, rural, historical, zhang yimou, art film ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: A woman married to the brutal and infertile owner of a dye mill in rural China conceives a boy with her husband's nephew but is forced to raise her son as her husband's heir without revealing his parentage in this circular tragedy. This tale of romantic and familial love in the face of unbreakable tradition is more universal than its setting.—Keith Loh <loh@sfu.ca>
Plot Keywords: drama, romance, ethics, family, tragedy, oppression, women ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: A pregnant peasant woman seeks redress from the Chinese bureaucracy after the village chief kicks her husband in the groin in this comedy of justice. As she is frustrated by each level of the hierarchy and travels farther and farther away from the countryside the viewer is also provided with a look at the changing Chinese society through the verite camera used in most scenes.—Keith Loh <loh@sfu.ca>
Plot Keywords: drama, rural, legal, female, social, realism, family ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: During the reign of the Tang dynasty in China, a secret organization called "The House of the Flying Daggers" rises and opposes the government. A police officer called Leo sends officer Jin to investigate a young dancer named Mei, claiming that she has ties to the "Flying Daggers". Leo arrests Mei, only to have Jin breaking her free in a plot to gain her trust and lead the police to the new leader of the secret organization. But things are far more complicated than they seem...
Plot Keywords: martial arts, romance, costume drama, action, assassin, conspiracy, tragedy ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: In a village of fishermen in Japan, Takata misses his son Kenichi, to whom he has been estranged for many years. When his daughter-in-law Rie tells him that Kenichi is sick in the hospital, she suggests Takata to come to Tokyo to visit his son in the hospital where he would have the chance to retie the relationship. However, Kenichi refuses to receive his father in his room, and Rie gives a videotape to Takata to know about the work of his son. Once at home, Takata sees a documentary in the remote village Lijiang, in the province of Younnan, about the passion of Kenichi, the Chinese opera, where the lead singer Li Jiamin promises to sing an important folk opera on the next year. When Rie calls Takata to tell that her husband has a terminal liver cancer, Takata decides to travel to Lijiang to shoot Li Jiamin singing the opera to give to Kenichi.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Plot Keywords: drama, family, father-son relationship, zhang yimou, japan, cultural differences, journey ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: 'Yellow Earth' focuses on the story of a communist soldier who is sent to the countryside to collect folk songs for the Communist Revolution. There he stays with a peasant family and learns that the happy songs he was sent to collect do not exist; the songs he finds are about hardship and suffering. He returns to the army, but promises to come back for the young girl, Cuiqiao, who has been spell-bound by his talk of the freedom women have under communist rule and who wants to join the Communist Army.—Ronald Aiken <aikenrd@netcom.com>
Plot Keywords: zhang yimou, traditional culture, visual aesthetics, cinematography, symbolism, realism, social criticism ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Set during China's Three Kingdom's era (AD 220-280). The story of a great king and his people, who will be expelled from their homeland and will aspire to claim it. The king, violent and ambitious, of mysterious methods and motives; his general, a visionary who yearns to win the final battle but needs to prepare his plans in secret; the women of the palace, who struggle to find redemption in a world where they have no place; and a commoner called "Lord of all the world", will be the characters around who turn the inexorable forces of this story.
Plot Keywords: martial arts, costume drama, action, drama, mystery, political intrigue, revenge ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: China, Later Tang Dynasty, 10th Century. On the eve of the Chong Yang Festival, golden flowers fill the Imperial Palace. The Emperor (Chow Yun Fat) returns unexpectedly with his second son, Prince Jai (Jay Chou). His pretext is to celebrate the holiday with his family, but given the chilled relations between the Emperor and the ailing Empress (Gong Li), this seems disingenuous. For many years, the Empress and Crown Prince Wan (Liu Ye), her stepson, have had an illicit liaison. Feeling trapped, Prince Wan dreams of escaping the palace with his secret love Chan (Li Man), the Imperial Doctor's daughter. Meanwhile, Prince Jai, the faithful son, grows worried over the Empress's health and her obsession with golden chrysanthemums. Could she be headed down an ominous path? The Emperor harbors equally clandestine plans; the Imperial Doctor (Ni Dahong) is the only one privy to his machinations. When the Emperor senses a looming threat, he relocates the doctor's family from the Palace to a ...
Plot Keywords: martial arts, costume drama, historical, romance, tragedy, family, power struggle ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: When Chairman Mao dies, many men jailed during his regime are released, including artist Zhang Gengnian (Sun Haiying), who comes back to his wife, Xiuqing (Joan Chen), and son, Xiangyang (Zhang Fan), after a long absence. There is unease in the family home, though, as Xiangyang is mistrustful of the father he barely knows and Gengnian is no longer able to paint after years of forced labor. Xiangyang begins to excel at art, which could either bring him closer to his father or widen the schism.
Plot Keywords: drama, family, romance, rural, father-son relationship, coming of age, chinese cinema ...
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