Movies like Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
The best movies like Raise the Red Lantern (1991) are Temptress Moon (1996), Farewell My Concubine (1993) and Ju Dou (1990). If Raise the Red Lantern hooked you with its drama, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedTo Live (1994)8.2/10 from 438 votes
- NewestOne Second (2020)Released 2020
- In ChineseTemptress Moon (1996)Also in Chinese
Temptress Moon (1996)
A symphony of vivid, sumptuous, dreamy, luxuriant colors symbolically weaving webs around doomed, decadent characters.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Farewell My Concubine (1993)
In an epic tale of theater, gender, love and class, two Beijing opera actors navigate political turmoil as their friendship evolves over decades.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisJu Dou (1990)
Tianqing falls in love with Ju Dou, his uncle's wife who is tortured for being childless. However, after they have an affair, they discover that his uncle is impotent and try to conceal the truth.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisNot One Less (1999)
Set in the People's Republic of China during the 1990s, the film centers on a 13-year-old substitute teacher, Wei Minzhi, in the Chinese countryside. Called in to substitute for a village teacher for one month, Wei is told not to lose any students.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisMemoirs of a Geisha (2005)
In the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisTo Live (1994)
Married couple Fugui and Jiazhen endure tumultuous events in mid-20th century mainland China as their personal fortunes move from wealthy landownership to peasantry.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisThe Road Home (1999)
Prompted by the death of his father and the grief of his mother, a man recalls the story of how they met in flashback.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisRed Sorghum (1988)
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.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Blue Kite (1994)
A young man recalls his childhood growing up in a poor alley in Beijing during the 1950s and 1960s.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisComing Home (2014)
Lu and Feng are a devoted couple forced to separate when Lu is arrested and sent to a labor camp as a political prisoner during the Cultural Revolution. He finally returns home only to find that his beloved wife no longer remembers him.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisFlowers of Shanghai (1998)
At the end of the 19th century, Shanghai is divided into several foreign concessions. In the British concession, a number of luxurious “flower houses” are reserved for the male elite of the city. Since Chinese dignitaries are not allowed to frequent brothels, these establishments are the only ones that these men can visit. They form a self-contained world, with its own rites, traditions and even its own language. The men don’t only visit the houses to frequent the courtesans but also to dine, smoke opium, play mahjong and relax. The women working there are known as the “flowers of Shanghai”.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Story of Qiu Ju (1992)
When her husband is kicked in the groin by the village head, Qiu Ju, a peasant woman, despite her pregnancy, travels to a nearby town, and later a big city to deal with its bureaucrats and find justice.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Crossing I (2014)
At the end of the World War II and the middle of the Chinese Revolution, three couples from different backgrounds with different nationalities flee from China to the island of Taiwan.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisThe Last Emperor (1987)
A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisChina Cry (1990)
Young Sung Neng Yee, who is brought as part of a wealthy Chinese family. She is eager to become part of Mao Tze Tung's "new society", but soon becomes disenchanted by the economic misery the changes bring to her family. Before long, the authorities become aware of Neng Yee's feelings and she is taken to a labour camp, overseen by the sadistic Colonel Cheng.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Shanghai Triad (1995)
Shanghai, China, 1930. When young Shuisheng arrives from the countryside, his uncle Liushu puts him at the service of Bijou, the mistress of Laoda, supreme boss of the Tang Triad, constantly threatened by his enemies, both those he knows and those lurking in the shadows.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Lover (1992)
A poor French teenage girl engages in an illicit affair with a wealthy Chinese heir in 1920s Saigon. For the first time in her young life she has control, and she wields it deftly over her besotted lover throughout a series of clandestine meetings and torrid encounters.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisXiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (1998)
Young teen girl Xiu Xiu is sent away to a remote corner of the Sichuan steppes for manual labor in 1975 (sending young people to there was a part of Cultural Revolution in China). A year later, she agrees to go to even more remote spot with a Tibetan saddle tramp Lao Jin to learn horse herding.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Woman Knight of Mirror Lake (2011)
When the women of her time had their feet bound to please men, Qiu Jin was already questioning the sexual inequality of feudal traditions. Free-spirited and well-educated, she grew up practicing martial arts and was as well versed in poetry as she was in sword-fighting. When this rebellious girl moved to Beijing with her husband, she witnessed how her country was raided and ravaged by foreign powers. With the encouragement of her neighbor Wu Zhiying, the wife of righteous magistrate Li Zhongyue, Qiu Jin left her family behind to pursue study in Japan. There, she met some like-minded schoolmates who shared her ideals, including revolutionary leader Xu Xilin, and secretly joined his anti-Qing cause. After returning to China, Qiu Jin participated in the uprisings staged by Xu Xilin, leading a small group of hot-blooded students against the armed forces of the corrupt Qing government...
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
The Scent of Green Papaya (1993)
1950s Saigon through the eyes of Mui, a Vietnamese servant girl. At 10 years-old, Mui leaves her village to work for an affluent, troubled family. As she comes of age, Mui finds work in the household of a pianist she has admired since childhood, and finds their relationship growing in complexity.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Painted Veil (2006)
A British medical doctor fights a cholera outbreak in a small Chinese village, while also being trapped at home in a loveless marriage to an unfaithful wife.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisDurian Durian (2000)
The first half of this film portrays the experiences of a young northern mainland Chinese woman (Fan) temporarily working as a sex worker in Hong Kong. After her 3-month visa expires, the second half of the film focuses on Yan's return to her family and her ex-fiancé in Northeast China and the ways that she invests the money that she has earned.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Hibiscus Town (1987)
Based on a novel by the same name written by Gu Hua, a melodrama about the life and travails of a young woman who lives through the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisBoat People (1982)
A Japanese photojournalist revisits Vietnam after the liberation to document the nation, and begins following and documenting the young children from a poor Vietnamese family.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisKing of the Children (1987)
An unschooled young man, one of the countless victims of Mao's Cultural Revolution, is laboring in the countryside when he is assigned to teach in a nearby school. Gradually, he abandons the Maoist textbook and encourages the barely literate kids to write about their own lives and feelings.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
The Great Magician (2011)
In the years after the Revolution, China broken up into fiefdoms held by warlords, who are busy fighting each other. One warlord has imprisoned a girl and wants her to be his seventh wife, but he's too honorable to force her. The local revolutionaries wants to kill him and bring back the republic. But when a stranger returns from abroad with mastery of magic to recover the girl he loved, who is tricking whom and who will win at the end?
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Concubine (2012)
A tragic love triangle story between Hwa-yeon, a daughter of a nobleman, her true love Kwon-yoo, a servant and the man who will be King, Prince Sung-won.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisDangerous Liaisons (2012)
Dangerous Liaisons is a Chinese film by Hur Jin-ho based on the novel with the same title by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisOne Second (2020)
A movie fan escapes from a labour camp during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and strikes up a relationship with a homeless female vagabond.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisYellow Earth (1984)
A communist soldier is sent to a remote region of China in order to collect folk songs. Staying with a peasant family (a widower with two small children), he discovers a community whose way of life is completely alien to him, but he gradually wins their trust.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like this
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like Raise the Red Lantern?
The closest matches to Raise the Red Lantern are Temptress Moon (1996), Farewell My Concubine (1993) and Ju Dou (1990). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after Raise the Red Lantern?
People who watched Raise the Red Lantern most often go on to Temptress Moon (1996), Farewell My Concubine (1993) and Ju Dou (1990).
What is the highest-rated movie like Raise the Red Lantern?
To Live (1994), rated 8.2/10 by 438 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like Raise the Red Lantern?
One Second (2020) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there Chinese movies like Raise the Red Lantern?
Yes: Temptress Moon (1996), Farewell My Concubine (1993) and Ju Dou (1990).
How are movies similar to Raise the Red Lantern chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside Raise the Red Lantern, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.