Best movies like Shanghai Dreams

A Communist soldier 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 spellbound by his talk of the freedom women have under Communist rule and who wants to join the Communist Army.

Fan Ruyi, a detective, finds himself framed after getting a top secret mission. Along the way he meets a blind performer and a powerful warlord's daughter that further complicates his quest to clear his name.

American businessmen and missionaries working in China are captured and held prisoner by a local warlord.

Lao Yang is not "a good father" in Chinese traditional way although he's already in his 60s. His wealth has been through ups and downs ferociously. His business went bankrupt years ago. Luckily, his three children are all grown up and have their own family. Lao Yang spends his days between taking care of his bedridden wife, keeping a mistress, collecting debts and gambling with mahjong. Conflicts between Lao Yang and his children escalate.

Zhang Ziyi plays the youngest of three generations of women who leads lives in Shanghai. Joan Chen plays the great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother. The film recounts this family, the mistakes they make, and a cycle that the granddaughter breaks out of.

The incredible saga of the Chinese immigrant Sung family, owners of Abacus Federal Savings of Chinatown, New York. Accused of mortgage fraud by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., Abacus becomes the only U.S. bank to face criminal charges in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The indictment and subsequent trial forces the Sung family to defend themselves – and their bank’s legacy in the Chinatown community – over the course of a five-year legal battle.

A waitress from Chicago falls in love with a man from rural Minnesota and marries him, with the intent of living a better life - but life on the farm has its own challenges.

A gambling queen uses blackmail to stop a British financier from closing her Chinese clip joint.

A person's life is destined to be shorter than that of a city. Having spent her whole life in Shanghai, Qiyao has her moments of prosperity and her fair share of loneliness. She finally fades and disappears but Shanghai remains a metropolitan city. Shanghai in the 1930s is glamorous and seductive.

China, 1930s, during the ravaging civil war. General Pen entrusts O'Hara, an intrepid American adventurer, with the mission of providing a large sum of money to Mr. Wu with the task of buying weapons in Shanghai to help end General Yang's tyranny that keeps an entire province under his ruthless iron boot.

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?

An upper-class son of urbane landowners falls in love with a peasant girl. When a pregnancy results, the couple are kept apart by strict societal morays.

Brings viewers into a small Chinese city and inspires familiarity with the rhythms of everyday existence, with people's dreams, shortcomings and illusions in a way that is universal.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Yu-liang leaves a brothel in a small Chinese town, to become the second wife of Mr. Pan. While Pan is away at the revolution in Yunnan, Yu-liang learns to paint and takes art classes at the Shanghai Art Institute, until it is closed for painting nudes. Because she cannot bear him a son, Yu-liang leaves Pan to his first wife, and studies art in Paris, where she wins an award for a nude self-portrait. She returns to join Pan in Nanking in the 1930's, and becomes a Professor until it is discovered that she came from a brothel. She returns to Paris to live the rest of her life there, and finally gains a major exhibition of her work.

Set in the decadent 1920s, Temptress Moon tells the very complicated story of a wealthy family living on the outskirts of Shanghai. Their youngest daughter, Ruyi, is brought up as a servant to her opium-addicted father and brother. Meanwhile, her brother-in-law Zhongliang has a successful, if illegal, career seducing and blackmailing married women in the city. When he comes to Ruyi's home the two fall in love, and trouble ensues.

A family embarks on an annual tormenting journey along with 200 other million peasant workers to reunite with their distant family, and to revive their love and dignity as China soars as the world's next super power.

Classes clash when a poor riveter and wealthy society woman fall in love with each other, much to the shock of her friends and family.

Shanghai, China. The last expatriate Westerners still living in the city are imprisoned in a hotel by the communist authorities in order to find the spy hiding among them.

With the help of her mother, family, friends, and fellow musicians, Aiyana Elliott reaches for her father, legendary cowboy troubadour, Ramblin' Jack Elliott. She explores who he is and how he got there, working back and forth between archival and contemporary footage. Born in 1932 in Brooklyn, busking through the South and West in the early 50s, a year with Woody Guthrie, six years flatpicking in Europe, a triumphant return to Greenwich Village in the early 60s, mentoring Bob Dylan, then life on the road, from gig to gig, singing and telling stories. A Grammy and the National Medal of Arts await Jack near the end of a long trail. What will Aiyana find for herself?

The young adult life of Hong Yunsheng, nicknamed Little Brother, is seen as somewhat of a failure by those that know him. A Chinese national, he stowed away on a boat to the United States, where he worked as a dishwasher in the restaurant of a family from his hometown back in Fujian province. After two years in the States and after fathering an illegitimate child there named Fusheng, the child's mother Xuhui who is the restaurateur's daughter, he was deported back to China. Since, he has been floundering in life, which has caused a rift between himself and his older brother, who, with his wife, operate a street front diner and can't have children of their own. Little Brother relies on his new girlfriend, a woman he barely knows named Wu Ruifang who is a performer in a touring opera troupe, for emotional support. Despite Little Brother being the local poster boy for not stowing away, his friend named Monkey tried to do the same, but died on the voyage over due to exposure to toxic ..

After the relatively low box office takings of 'Intolerance', D. W. Griffith would revisit his epic film three years later by releasing two of the film's interlocking stories as standalone features, with some new additional footage. The second of these was 'The Mother and the Law', which demonstrates how crime, moral puritanism, and conflicts between ruthless capitalists and striking workers help ruin the lives of marginal Americans.

Pedro returns home to a small mountain village in Guerrero, Mexico after years of working in the US. He finds his daughters older, and more distant than he imagined. His wife still has the same smile. Having saved some earnings from two trips to the US, he hopes to now finally make a better life with his family, and even to pursue his dreams on the side by starting a band: Copa Kings. He cherishes the everyday moments with his family. The villagers think this year's crop will be bountiful. There is also good work in a growing city an hour away. But the locals are wise to a life of insecurity, and their thoughts are often of family members or opportunities far away, north of the border. While working in the fields, Pedro meets and begins to mentor a teenager who dreams of the US. That place somehow always feels very present, practically knocking at the door. "Aquí y Allá" is a story about hope, and the memories and loss of what we leave behind.

Laurel, a Chicago-based business executive, travels to Memphis to secure one of the city's oldest family-owned banks. While in Memphis, Laurel reunites with old flame Clay, a local music promoter with loftier aspirations. Though Laurel tries to keep her eye on the prize of the business acquisition, Clay is very persuasive reminding her of the days when they were a performing duo on the brink of stardom. Now Laurel's focus turns to the home of the Blues and dreams of making music again.

Tenacious and optimistic, Mini (Angelica Lee) is an acrobat at a Shanghai circus troupe. Having lost both her parents at a young age, Mini has never had a real family, and her greatest dream is to find a love that she can rely on, a love that will make her fly. Kang (Liu Ye) works at a music store called Go With the Flow, which just about sums up his aimless lifestyle. Raised in an overly strict family, Kang grew up into a rebellious young man who likes to challenge social norms. These two very different young people meet by chance in the bustle of modern Shanghai, and spark a story of pure love and vertigo as their confused worlds collide.

Set in the future, the city of Shanghai battle to defend itself against an ongoing attack by an alien force that has attacked and laid siege to numerous cities around the globe in it's quest to harvest a hidden energy only found on earth.

The Battle of Shanghai has been described as the last battle of World War I, and the first battle of World War II. It was a warning to the world, a warning that was ignored. And it was the place where the destiny of modern China was set in motion. Based on the book “Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze” by Danish author Peter Harmsen, this film introduces key figures in the conflict, chronicles how the battle unfolded over the course of three months, and explores the aftermath and years of war that followed.

The Concerts in China was a concert tour by Jean Michel Jarre, notable for marking the opening of post-Mao Zedong China to live Western music, in 1981. Five concerts were held in the two biggest cities, for an estimated audience of 120,000 spectators, on October 21 and 22 in Beijing, and on October 26 through 28 in Shanghai.

In cold wintry Yanji, a city on China's northern border, young urbanite Haofeng, visiting from Shanghai, feels lost and adrift. By chance, he goes on a tour led by Nana, a charming tour guide who instantly fascinates him. She introduces him to Xiao, a personable but frustrated restaurant worker. The three bond quickly over a drunken weekend. Confronting their individual traumas, their frozen desires slowly thaw as they seek to liberate themselves from an icy world.

TRU, 37, is a serial bed-hopping lesbian who cannot commit to a relationship or a job for long...that is, until she meets ALICE, 60, a beautiful widow, who has come to town at the last minute to visit her daughter, SUZANNE, 35, a too-busy corporate lawyer and Tru's friend. Alice and Tru begin to forge an unlikely friendship...and more. Suzanne, who has a deeply conflicted relationship with her mother and a complicated past with Tru, becomes increasingly alarmed at the growing bond between Tru and her mother. Tensions escalate after Suzanne witnesses an intimate moment between them. She tries to sabotage the budding romance, but it backfires, as Tru Love is hard to contain.

Frannie Vaughn (Fawcett) comes back home after being away a long time, only to find that her mother has died. She also finds out that her sister, Natalie (Crow) and her husband, Jake (Bryce), are planning to sell the acres once owned by Frannie and Natalie's family. To buy the land back from her sister, Frannie gets a job and falls in love with a fellow worker, Rubin (Johnson). In the end, Frannie's dreams come true and Natalie comes to her senses and moves in to the old family house with Frannie and Rubin.

Da Chuan, who was born in the 1980s, used to work at a train accessory factory as a repairman in Qiqihar city of Heilongjiang province, Northeast China. As majority of the average people there, his life is nothing special but routine.

Three stories are told, respectively set in Tokyo, Taipei, and Shanghai. The first two stories are about a Japanese person and a Taiwanese person. The last one is set in Shanghai with a story about a Japanese man and a Chinese woman. Some of the characters can speak Japanese and some of them Mandarin. Each story encompasses an experience of a foreigner, either from Japan ,Taiwan or China, with a native of the opposite country.

A wild country girl moves to Shanghai with her painter boyfriend and experiences exploitation and poverty.

Gerrit Ammidon, despairing of any chance to marry his love, Nettie Vollar, because of a bitter feud between his father and her grandfather, sails to China to "get away from it all". While in Shanghai he rescues a beautiful young woman being attacked by a gang of street toughs. She turns out to be Taou Yuen, a Manchu princess. Gerrit discovers that, unless she finds a husband, she will be put to death, and he agrees to marry her. They return to Java Head, the Ammidon family home in Salem, Massachusetts, but Gerrit's "homecoming" has some unexpected consequences.

After the Robb Elementary school shooting in Texas, local Uvalde Leader-News journalists are left to report on the fallout – and on one of their staff members. Reporter Kimberly Rubio rises to national prominence as an advocate for gun reform after her ten-year-old daughter, Lexi, is killed in the shooting. Through the journalists’ reporting, we witness the social fabric of this small Texas town unravel as Kimberly and other victims’ families search for accountability from law enforcement and local leaders. The documentary also shines a light on the critical role of community journalism, at a time when local newspapers are folding rapidly across the country.