Best movies like Daybreak
A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Daybreak Starring Li Lili, Zhanfei Gao, Juanjuan Ye, Congmei Yuan, and more. If you liked Daybreak then you may also like: Why Do Fools Fall In Love, Nefarious: Merchant of Souls, Our Sons, A Beautiful New World, Blood Brothers and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.
A country girl and her boyfriend arrive in Shanghai for a better life. They soon find only desperation. She is raped and falls into prostitution as he drifts into revolutionary circles. Her access through her trade grants her greater access which she uses to aid her revolutionary lover with tragic results.
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Nefarious: Merchant of Souls
Travel across four continents, through 19 countries, and into dingy Cambodian karaoke bars, Amsterdam’s infamous red-light district, Moldovan orphanages, legal Nevada brothels, and the street corners and alleyways of metropolises worldwide for more than a glance at the fastest-growing organized crime industry in the world with the groundbreaking, tell-all Nefarious: Merchant of Souls.
Our Sons
When James admits to his mother that he is gay it strains her liberal attitude. A San Diego businesswoman, Audrey believes she is a modern, open-minded mother, but the news sends her reeling. However, the real shock comes when James asks her to travel to Arkansas and inform his lover's estranged mom, Luanne, that her son has AIDS. As Audrey and Luanne learn to put aside their prejudice toward each other, they soon discover how to share their thoughts, hopes and fears for their sons.
A Beautiful New World
A satirical comedy about a country bumpkin who goes to the big city, and ends up teaching the cynical city folk a few lessons about basic human decency. The hero leaves home for the first time to go to Shanghai, to collect his lottery prize - a brand new apartment. However, when he arrives, he is told by the developers that his apartment block will take a year and a half to complete. He decides to find a job in Shanghai and wait for his apartment to materialise...
Blood Brothers
Three best friends who are barely getting by as fishermen seek their fate in 1930s Shanghai. Upon arriving in the bustling city, the naïve trio gradually find their innocence corrupted as they fall into the deepest depths of the criminal underworld.
Dangerous Liaisons
Dangerous Liaisons is a Chinese film by Hur Jin-ho based on the novel with the same title by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.
Fig Trees
FIG TREES is a documentary opera about AIDS activists Tim McCaskell of Toronto and Zackie Achmat of Capetown as they fight for access to treatment drugs. Documentary interviews, speeches, press conferences and demonstrations are sampled, taken apart, and set to music, replayed this time as operatic scenes. A surreal fictional narrative is intercut with the stories of their struggles against government and the pharmaceutical industry. In this fictional world, Gertrude Stein decides to write a tragic opera about Tim and Zackie and their saint-like heroism. She kidnaps them, transports them to Niagara Falls, and forces them to sing a series of complicated avant-garde vocal compositions. However, when Zackie ends his treatment strike and starts taking his pills, Gertrude realizes that there will be no more tragedy, and thus, no more opera.
Shanghai Express
A beautiful temptress re-kindles an old romance while trying to escape her past during a tension-packed train journey.
Who's That Knocking at My Door
A Catholic New Yorker falls in love with a girl and wants to marry her, but he struggles to accept her past and what it means for their future.
Hanson and the Beast
Yuan Shuai, a debt-ridden animal-breeder, tries to get out of his financial predicament by finding a wealthy girlfriend through matchmaking dates. He unexpectedly meets and fall in love with the fox demon, Bai Xianchu, who has arrived to the mortal realm to repay her gratitude. However, the head of the Demon tribe Yun Zhonghe forbids a love relationship between a demon and a human; and takes Bai Xianchu away. To seek his lover, Yuan Shuai bravely crashes the demonic world.
I Wish I Knew
Focuses on the people, their stories and architecture spanning from the mid-1800s, when Shanghai was opened as a trading port, to the present day.
Perhaps Love
A love triangle develops between the male and female leads and the director during the making of a musical in Mainland China.
Suzhou River
After getting out of prison, small-time crook Mardar stumbles upon a woman who looks exactly like his long-lost lover.
Laughing at Life
Easter, a soldier of fortune and gunrunner, leaves his family behind escaping from the authorities and an American detective named Mason. His globe hopping escape leads him finally to South America, where he is hired to organize a band of revolutionaries, unaware that they plan to eliminate him when his job is done. Here, also, he encounters his own son, on track to waste his own life in pursuits similar to Easter's.
Charlie Chan in Shanghai
When a prominent official is murdered at a banquet honoring Charle Chan, the detective and son Lee team up to expose an opium-smuggling ring.
Rumi: Turning Ecstatic
In December 1997, Tina Petrova drove off a cliff - literally and figuratively. A tragic car crash in the California desert was the beginning of a journey that would lead her to the extraordinary works of 13th century Sufi mystic Mevlana Jellaludin Rumi and to a remarkable array of people whose lives have been transformed by his poetry and philosophy. Rumi: Turning Ecstatic is her true story, a timely, powerful docudrama that take the viewer into the very heart of Sufi mysticism.
A Dark Song
A determined young woman and a damaged occultist risk their lives and souls to perform a dangerous ritual that will grant them what they want.
The Red Kimona
A woman is abandoned by her lover and prostitution is the only way she has to survive.
Traffic in Souls
A woman, with the aid of her police officer sweetheart, endeavors to uncover the prostitution ring that has kidnapped her sister, and the philanthropist who secretly runs it.
The Tenth Man
During World War 2 the Germans arrested people at random off the streets of Paris and in retaliation to sabotage by the resistance announced the execution of one in ten prisoners. Chosen as one of the victims, lawyer Chavel trades his place with another man in return for all his possessions. At the end of the war he returns to his house and tries to integrate himself with the family of the man who traded places with him, all the while hiding his true identity. However matters are complicated when a stranger arrives claiming to be Chavel.
Better Than Love
A reluctant drug dealer strives to elevate his friends' lives while the addictive forces of an ignorant Oxycontin prescription corrodes his own.
Trouble Will Find Us
Tess is an ambitious lawyer with a bright future. Henry is a charismatic artist whose career is in decline. Despite their obvious differences, a chance encounter leads to Tess and Henry falling for each other. What follows are periods of joy and romance as we are granted intimate access to the couple’s journey together. Soon the obstacles of life begin to surface and Tess and Henry are forced to endure a wind of change. Realising that love is about compromise and commitment, how far are both willing to go in order to save their relationship?
Just a Dream
Film crew arrives in a small town in Nevada desert. Ends up changing the life of a 12-year-old kid and a friend of his, a movie lover.
Behind Me
The twenty-something Betty comes to a remote small town and strikes a friendship with the fourteen-year old local girl Lea, who is fascinated by her new friend's tales of partying and living in the fast lane in the big city. Betty has ulterior motives for befriending the young girl, however.
Drifting Snow
Two strangers, Joanne (Sonja Smits) and Chris (Jonas Bonnetta) share a winter road trip through rural eastern Ontario. After losing her husband John (Colin Mochrie), Joanne faces the rituals of remote rural life on her own, while Chris is processing his failing eyesight and the loss of his mother and the new responsibility of taking over her old home in the country. As their journey together unfolds, their drifting memories reveal parallel experiences, helping each of them shift the focus of their destination.
Green Plaid Shirt
This endearing drama depicts the lives of five gay friends — in conflict with themselves and each other — at the dawn of the AIDS era. Back in 1978 everything seemed possible. For Phillip and Guy, there was the thrill and exhilaration of first love. For their friends Devon, Jerry and Todd, life was still an open book with so many pages yet to be filled. Ten years later, his friends are all gone and Phillip is left alone to make sense of the joys and sorrows of his past life — as he looks hopefully to the future. The lives of two ordinary men who find love together only to lose it. In an era of easy sex and open relationships they have only two rules: Don't fall in love with others and no jealousy. Still rules are made to be broken. Eventually a single act of forgiveness restores their love.
The Wild and the Innocent
Charming tale of mountaineer-trapper Murphy's first taste "big city" life with young, sweet Sandra Dee in tow. She flees her family, which tried to trade her for some of Murphy's beaver pelts, and tags along with the reluctant Murphy. They get into all manner of trouble in town, and Murphy has to shoot the sheriff to rescue Dee from her job as a dancehall girl.
The Music Box
In the late 1930s, the Japanese army occupies Shanghai. Barber Lu Ping kills a Japanese officer by accident and then escapes from Shanghai to the residence of his master's brother, Song Fengnian. When he arrives at the small town, he falls in love with Song's daughter Jiayi at the first sight. However, Jiayi has had the engagement with an officer for a decent life in the wartime, even as concubine. After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, Lu is sentenced to death as a traitor because Song, his boss, has worked for the Japanese. When he closes his eyes and waits for the sound of shot, Jiayi rescues him. Arranged by her husband, Lu becomes an officer. However, he can never forget Jiayi and his barber life. After the end of the Civil War, Lu is sent to work on a farm in the northwest. There he learns that Jiayi doesn't leave with her husband and has been waiting for him at the small town where they meet for the first time. Lu decides to look for Jiayu.
Why Do Fools Fall In Love
In the mid-80s, three women (each with an attorney) arrive at the office of New York entertainment manager, Morris Levy. One is an L.A. singer, formerly of the Platters; one is a petty thief from Philly; one teaches school in a small Georgia town. Each claims to be the widow of long-dead doo-wop singer-songwriter Frankie Lyman, and each wants years of royalties due to his estate, money Levy has never shared. During an ensuing civil trial, flashbacks tell the story of each one's life with Lyman, a boyish, high-pitched, dynamic performer, lost to heroin. Slowly, the three wives establish their own bond.