Best movies like Purple Butterfly

Shanghai gangsters grapple with lust and loyalty on the eve of war with Japan as they try to navigate an alliance with the enemy's army.

A railroad worker in China in 1941 leads a team of freedom fighters against the Japanese in order to get food for the poor.

An old leper who owned a remote sorghum winery dies. Jiu'er, the wife bought by the leper, and her lover, identified only as "my Grandpa" by the narrator, take over the winery and set up an idealized quasi-matriarchal community headed by Jiu'er. When the Japanese invaders subject the area to their rule and cut down the sorghum to make way for a road, the community rises up and resists as the sorghum grows anew.

In 1937, Japan began their invasion of China by murdering over 300,000 people in the capital of Nanjing. The atrocities committed against women and their daughters are especially barbaric. One of them is Xiaoyun, a peasant girl who fights with the Chinese resistance group. On her way to freedom she must fight against Japanese soldiers, ninjas, a killer geisha, Nazis, and the evil General of the Japanese imperial army.

Yang Rui falls in love for the cleaning woman who works in a taekwando gym, only to later discover she's an undercover cop named An Xin. An is in hiding from drug smugglers who have a score to settle with her - a raid she led resulted in the death of one of the smuggler's parents. To complicate matters further, An was previously romantically involved with the smuggler whose parents were killed.

A true-story account of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.

A teenage orphan fights against the Red Army at the end of WWII and in the aftermath is 'adopted' by a Commissar. Years later he is sent to London during the Cold war to work for the KGB, where he questions his life.

In 1942, Henan Province was devastated by the most tragic famine in modern Chinese history, resulting in the deaths of at least three million men, women and children. Although the primary cause of the famine was a severe drought, it was exacerbated by locusts, windstorms, earthquakes, epidemic disease and the corruption of the ruling Kuomintang government.

During WWII, a three-man commando team places its trust in the hands of a band of Filipino resistors, as they try to knock out a Japenese communication center.

This is a drama set in Nazi-occupied France at the height of World War II. Charlotte Gray tells the compelling story of a young Scottish woman working with the French Resistance in the hope of rescuing her lover, a missing RAF pilot. Based on the best-selling novel by Sebastian Faulks.

In 1937, during the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Imperial Japanese Army has just captured Nanjing, then-capital of the Republic of China. What followed was known as the Nanking Massacre, or the Rape of Nanking, a six week period wherein tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed.

When the Nazi high command learns in late 1943 that Winston Churchill will be spending time at a country estate in Norfolk, it hatches an audacious scheme to kidnap the prime minister and spirit him to Germany for enforced negotiations with Hitler.

North Africa, World War II. British soldiers on the brink of collapse push beyond endurance to struggle up a brutal incline. It's not a military objective. It's The Hill, a manmade instrument of torture, a tower of sand seared by a white-hot sun. And the troops' tormentors are not the enemy, but their own comrades-at-arms.

Jamie Graham, a privileged English boy, is living in Shanghai when the Japanese invade and force all foreigners into prison camps. Jamie is captured with an American sailor, who looks out for him while they are in the camp together. Even though he is separated from his parents and in a hostile environment, Jamie maintains his dignity and youthful spirit, providing a beacon of hope for the others held captive with him.

During the Japanese occupation of China, two prisoners are dumped in a peasant's home in a small town. The owner is bullied into keeping the prisoners until the next New Year, at which time they will be collected. The village leaders convene to interrogate the prisoners. The townspeople then struggle to accommodate the prisoners. One is a bellicose Japanese nationalist, the other a nervous translator. Will the townspeople manage to keep the prisoners until the New Year?

During World War II, a secret agent must seduce then assassinate an official who works for the Japanese puppet government in Shanghai. Her mission becomes clouded when she finds herself falling in love with the man she is assigned to kill.

In December 1937, during the Second Japanese-Sino War, a Chinese doctor, his Japanese pregnant wife, their teenage daughter and their young son travel from Shanghai to Nanjing seeking shelter in the Capital during the Japanese invasion. The family faces the Rape of Nanking by the Imperial Japanese Army, with rapes, mass murder of prisoners of war and civilians including women, children and elders, and disrespect of international conventions.

A WWII Drama about a German/Jewish industrialist who, in order to ensure his family's safe passage out of Germany, is forced to hand over his business to the Nazis.

The Japanese forces occupy Shanghai and slowly start spreading terror in the city. Chen Zhen, who was presumed dead, returns to fight against the Japanese and put an end to their tyrannical rule.

While Yeung Kam Wing is trying to remove all connections between the mob and him, his actions are being carefully observed by Lau Kin Ming, who bears a personal grudge against him.

Cheng, a young man who is set up by the chief of police, must leave the life he knows and Qiu, the woman he loves, to start again. After escaping prison Cheng quickly and violently moves his way up the ladder of Shanghais criminal underworld to become on the most powerful mob bosses in Shanghais history. But fame and notoriety take their toll when Cheng finds himself stuck between the looming Japanese army and the scheming local secret service. Matters are only made worse when he bumps into the love of his life QIU, along with her writer husband. Will love re-kindle in the dusk of an era?

After a series of assassinations in Nanking, a Japanese spy master gathers a group of suspects in a mansion, then a tense cat-and-mouse game erupts as the Chinese agent tries to keep his or her identity a secret.

Eternal Wave 密战 is a Chinese film set during the anti-Japanese occupation era starring Aaron Kwok, Zhao Li Ying and Zhang Han. It follows the main protagonist Lin Xiang who is a spy working underground to reestablish what was destroyed ruing the Battle of Shanghai. He meets a simple yet patriotic young lady who becomes his partner as they infiltrate the enemy as a couple. Apart from that, they cross paths with Liang Dong, a man whose motives are unclear.

London, England, May 2000. The peaceful life of elderly Joan Stanley is suddenly disrupted when she is arrested by the British Intelligence Service and accused of providing information to communist Russia during the forties.

An American man returns to a corrupt, Japanese-occupied Shanghai four months before Pearl Harbor and discovers his friend has been killed. While he unravels the mysteries of the death, he falls in love and discovers a much larger secret that his own government is hiding.

In the spring of 1945, Japan established a secret base, Unit 731 in Manchuria, where many innocent Chinese, Korean and Mongolian people were killed in grotesque experiments. An idealistic young doctor , Morishima, is horrified by the experiments being performed in the camp and when his fiancée arrives disguised as a Chinese prisoner he sets out to liberate the camp. A docudrama sequel to the notorious Men Behind the Sun, which pulls no punches when it comes to delivering the shocks!

About young British journalist, George Hogg, who with the assistance of a courageous Australian nurse, saves a group of orphaned children during the Japanese occupation of China in 1937.

In 1937, eight hundred Chinese soldiers fight under siege from a warehouse in the middle of the Shanghai battlefield, completely surrounded by the Japanese army.

Vusi Madlazi returns to the South African village he left as a young boy (he was organizing against apartheid, and left in fear of his life) to bury his father. He meets up with his brother Ernest, who tells him their other brother Stephen couldn't be contacted. Vusi goes to Johannesburg to find him, but at first can only find his neighbor/girlfriend, Karin, a stripper. Vusi proceeds to learn how conditions have changed since the end of apartheid, not always for the better for black men.

The story of writer Xiao Hong comes alive through memories of her great love affair, literary influence and escape from China during World War II.

An espionage thriller set in the 1950s and adapted from the novel "Year Suan/Plot Against" by May Jia. Tony Leung Chiu Wai plays a blind man who works for a piano tuner. He is recruited for a spy mission because of his exceptional hearing.

It is 1944 and the D-Day invasion has failed, Germany's army have successfully invaded England and the Nazi war-machine is now heading west towards Wales. A group of women in an isolated Welsh village near the English border wake up to discover all of the their husbands have mysteriously vanished. They have headed into the mountains to join the Resistance.

Based on a true story its the untold story of Italian World War II POW"S in Jan 1946. Luca Zingaretti stars as one of over 50,000 Italian Prisoners of War detained at POW camps in the U.S. Roy Schneider stars as Colonel Gartner, the Commander of the camp. Things take a turn for the worse when Manin is brought back from his most recent escape by a patrol force, only to realize that the camp has been evacuated while he was gone. Gartner is forced to keep Manin at the camp until another patrol force can come pick him up. However, no one ever comes. The phone lines get cut, and the two men realize they are completely isolated from the outside world. It is up to each man now to escape the camp.An untold and rarely known fact of US held Italian POW"S

During the brutal invasion of China in 1937 by Imperial Japanese forces, tens of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war are murdered and women raped in what is known simply as "The Rape of Nanking." This docudrama is a stirring account of a small band of courageous American missionaries who choose to stay in Nanking to try and protect a quarter million vulnerable Chinese civilians who are trapped in a city ruled by a savage, out of control army. Their stories are brought vividly to life through actual real-time letters and diaries as they bear witness to one of the worst wartime atrocities in history.

The Chinese army stops the Japanese army in 1938 at Suzhou.