The Best Films of Taiwan, China

The New Cinema and what it broke from

Almost everything on this list descends from a few years in the early 1980s, when a group of young directors — Edward Yang, Ko I-chen and Chang Yi among them — launched the Taiwan New Cinema with the 1982 anthology In Our Time. The core movement ran only to about 1987, but its house style outlasted it: long takes, deep focus, non-professional actors, and stories pressed flat against ordinary social reality rather than genre. That grammar is the through-line connecting nearly every film ranked here, from the founding generation to its second-wave heirs. The page is drawn by country of origin — Wikidata's Taiwan tag — and then re-sorted entirely by our composite score, so the order below answers a narrower question than "what is Taiwanese cinema": it asks which of these films the world's canons have actually kept.

How to read our list

The answer, at the top, is Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness (1989), our highest-ranked entry — the first Taiwanese film to look directly at the February 28 Incident and the White Terror after martial law lifted, and the winner of the Golden Lion at the 46th Venice Film Festival in 1989. What follows it is the most telling stretch of the ranking. Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), the wuxia film that carried the genre to a global audience, sits second by score; Edward Yang's Yi Yi (2000) is third and his A Brighter Summer Day (1991) fourth. Three directors, four films, and a clean split between the arthouse register the New Cinema invented and the crossover spectacle that grew out of it — both scoring near the top, which is unusual.

Lower down, the list quietly rewrites the reputational hierarchy. Tsai Ming-liang, whose Vive L'Amour (1994) also took a Venice Golden Lion, lands his films across the middle and tail — Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), The River (1997), Stray Dogs (2013) — because festival honours and accumulated canonical weight are not the same currency, and our score tracks the latter. Twenty-nine films sit under this heading in all.

The elders the movement wrote over

The two oldest films here belong to no New Cinema at all. King Hu's wuxia landmarks — A Touch of Zen (1971) and Dragon Gate Inn (1967) — predate the 1982 rupture by more than a decade, and their ranks (mid-list and near the bottom respectively) show what the composite does with a body of work the New Cinema deliberately turned away from. Hu built kinetic, choreographed genre cinema; the directors who followed built the opposite, and the data records the switch as a slow decline in his relative standing rather than a verdict on the films themselves. Read the list, in other words, as two arguments at once: which Taiwanese films the canons hold, and which era of Taiwanese filmmaking those canons were built to reward.