East Asian Movies I must Watch

Ito, a gangland enforcer, is caught amidst a treacherous and violent insurrection within his Triad crime family upon his return home from a stint abroad.

A suicidal, obsessively compulsive Japanese librarian is forced to lie low in Thailand with a pot-smoking woman coping with the recent loss of her sister.

The story recounts the early life of Genghis Khan who was a slave before going on to conquer half the world in 1206.

The story is of a deaf-mute hitman and his partner who are based in Bangkok. He is friends with his partner's girlfriend who is a stripper at a local club. They go about their assassination business as usual as the boss climbs the underworld ladder and forms new alliances. Flashbacks explain how he got to this point in his life. He forms a relationship with a young woman from the pharmacy who is caring and innocent. The hunts continue as treachery begins. A big name hit makes him realize that good people are hurt by his actions. The first rule of assassination closes in on him as he strikes revenge.

The story of a love affair that begins during a picnic on the Thai-Burmese border.

Inspired by the life of Luang Pradit Pairoh the most revered traditional Thai music master who lived during the reigns of Kings Rama V to VIII.

Although the hearts and goals and desires are different for everyone in a culturally-shifting Ho Chi Minh City, the stories of four separate individuals paint a vivid picture of the past, present, and future of a city eking into a new era.

Duyen faces a daily struggle to care for her young son and her weakened father-in-law, while keeping secret the fact that her husband died in a battle during the war.

With the brilliant Vietnamese summer as a setting Vertical Ray of the Sun is beautiful from beginning to end. The plot centres around three sisters, two of whom are happily married (or so it appears). The youngest sister is single and living with her cute older brother, whom she is desperately in love with. A second sister is married to a man who has another woman and child elsewhere whom he loves just as much as his wife -with a few conditions, she agrees to carry on with the marriage. The third sister and her husband are overjoyed to discover she is pregnant, and though he is tempted, her husband remains loyal to her. Charming, slow-paced, face value, family saga film.

A woman, fired from a financial coorporation during the Asia crisis, returns home with no money. However, she finds a box with a fortune in front of her door, and decides to keep it. However, the people that left it there soon want it back.

Peigang, his family's only son for three generations running, is to be executed on account of larceny, but not without the intervention of his grandmother.

One day when Pickle and his friend Belly Bottom watch the dashcam recordings of Pickle's boss they stumble upon a secret.

A crime boss searching for the world's best fighters pursues a talented Japanese drifter and his American ex-classmate, while an Interpol agent and a US Army captain seek to bring him down.

A young peasant boy named Jack climbs a giant beanstalk and stumbles upon a city in the clouds ruled by an evil queen.

A 5 year old kid moves to live with his grandma in a small town at Taiwan. Soon after, he discovers that her grandma is not only a vendor, but also she is good at catching spectres. One day, she comes across that her grandson has mistakenly releases some of the most ferocious ghosts from her house...

An attractive and successful doctor places a personal ad in a newspaper to try to meet (and eventually marry) Mr. Right. A succession of blind dates ensues, featuring men who are lonely, desperate, dangerous and perverted.

Young boy, Ah-Jiang, a school failure and day dreamer witnesses the kidnapping of a child. After being taken hostage by a corrupt family, he begins an unusual adventure away from home.

Puppeteer Li Tian-lu tells his life story, and through it, the story of Taiwan in the first half of the 20th century.

Set in 1920s Taiwan under Japanese rule, two men join the Chiu-Fen gold rush hoping for riches, while a widow struggles and a prostitute yearns for freedom. A mine collapse traps miners as the widow leaves town.

The story follows a young man as he changes from an intelligently aware youth, to a teenager with much less confidence than he once had, and finally, to a stable adult.

Tjoet Nja' Dhien assumes the leadership when her husband Teuku Umar is killed in an ambush. Dhien's charismatic presence and power of survival motivate the locals to join and later continue their opposition to the Dutch in Aceh in 1896.

A family's attempt at matchmaking their oldest daughter and the conflicts that follow.

A hero of revolution returns to civilian life to find the new society very different from the ideals he fought for.

A romance between a soldier and a country boy, wrapped around a Thai folk-tale involving a shaman with shape-shifting abilities.

This landmark film is considered by many to be one of the most important in Philippine cinema. The son of a wealthy man, Junior has everything he could possibly want. But the emptiness of his extravagant lifestyle and the hypocrisy of the town's so-called leading citizens weigh heavily on him, pushing him to reach out to the village outcasts.