Best Taiwanese drama movies

Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life's meaning as they live through everyday quandaries. NJ is morose: his brother owes him money, his mother-in-law is in a coma, his wife suffers a spiritual crisis when she finds her life a blank and his business partners make bad decisions.

9th century China. Ten year old general’s daughter Nie Yinniang is abducted by a nun who initiates her into the martial arts, transforming her into an exceptional assassin charged with eliminating cruel and corrupt local governors. One day, having failed in a task, she is sent back by her mistress to the land of her birth, with orders to kill the man to whom she was promised – a cousin who now leads the largest military region in North China. After 13 years of exile, the young woman must confront her parents, her memories and her long-repressed feelings.

The arrogant, third most-wanted criminal in Taiwan, decides to get rid of the top two competitors and crowns himself the most-wanted criminal before dying.

Retired and widowed Chinese master chef Chu lives in modern day Taipei, with his three attractive daughters, all of whom are unattached. Soon, each daughter encounters a new man in their lives. When these new relationships blossom, stereotypes are broken and the living situation within the family changes.

A boy experiences first love, friendships and injustices growing up in 1960s Taiwan.

A Taiwanese-American man is happily settled in New York with his American boyfriend. He plans a marriage of convenience to a Chinese woman in order to keep his parents off his back and to get the woman a green card. Chaos follows when his parents arrive in New York for the wedding.

A family of four fractures under the weight of unmet expectations, unexpected tragedy, and uncompromising pride.

When Sanlian's ex-husband passes away, she discovers he has altered his insurance policy, cutting out their son in favor of a stranger named Jay.

Ye Xiang Lun, a talented piano player is a new student at the prestigious Tamkang School. On his first day, he meets Lu Xiao Yu, a pretty girl playing a mysterious piece of music.

An American travels to Bhutan searching for a valuable antique rifle and crosses paths with a young monk who wanders through the serene mountains, instructed by his teacher to make things right again.

Vicky recalls her romances with her exes Hao Hao and Jack in the neon-lit clubs of Taipei.

Security guard Pickle and his trash collector friend Belly Button kill time together in night shifts watching the American-educated boss's dash-cam recordings of his various sexual encounters with women. Against the buddies' will, something horrifying rather than erotic reveals.

An uncompromising look into urban life from the eyes of a voyeuristic photographer, a rebellious teenager, and a married couple teetering on the edge of adultery.

A young woman urgently seeks to navigate the maze of contemporary Taipei and find a future. She hopes that her boyfriend Lung is the key to the future, but Lung is stuck in a past that combines baseball and traditional loyalty that leads him to squander his nest egg bailing her father out of financial trouble.

In Taipei, revenge and love twist the paths of wayward youths.

On a dark and rainy night, a historic and regal Taipei cinema sees its final film: 1967 martial arts feature "Dragon Inn".

In the 1960s, two classmates go looking for their missing friends and teachers, all of whom took part in an illegal book club, only to come face to face with ghosts and deformed monsters that have taken over their school.

A debt collector strikes a deal with a debt-ridden woman struggling to care for her ailing father: he will take care of her bills if she agrees to date him.

An indigenous clan-based people living in harmony with nature find their way of life threatened when violent interlopers from another culture arrive, intent on seizing their natural resources and enslaving them. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale - Part 1: The Sun Flag is Part one of the two-part, four-hour Taiwanese edition of the film Warriors of the Rainbow.

A one-armed martial arts master is being stalked by an Imperial assassin, the master of two fighters killed in the previous film. When the One-Armed Boxer is invited to attend a martial arts tournament, his efforts to lay low are unsuccessful, and the assassin soon tracks him down with the help of his three subordinates: a Thai boxer, a yoga master, and a kobojutsu user.

Madame Tang colludes and mediates between the government and the private businesses for the benefits of her all-female family. One case does not go according to plan, and an entire family close to Madame Tang fall victim to a gruesome murder. Ambition, desire and lust eventually change Tang's relationships with her own family forever.

The story of a family embroiled in the "White Terror," the Kuomintang government's anti-communist political repression that was wrought on the Taiwanese people from 1947-1987.

Three lonely young denizens of Taipei unknowingly share an apartment: May, a real estate agent who uses it for her sexual affairs; Ah-jung, her current lover; and Hsiao-kang, who's stolen the key and uses the apartment as a retreat.

Yueh-chen has an obsession with her classmate Shihao, but is too shy to confess to him directly. She sends in her best friend, Kerou, to act as a go-between, and Shihao ends up falling for Kerou, who is not sure what to think of him.

Someone in a prison run by a corrupt warden fakes the deaths of convicts to later use them as expendable assassins. A police officer is sent into the prison to gather evidence of the corruption.

When a mysterious corpse is found in a river, a distressed police officer delves into a string of grisly murders as danger quickly approaches.

A story about a karaoke-addicted old woman struggling with her self-worth and a sense of betrayal at her long-lost husband's funeral where she encounters his younger and more sophisticated girlfriend while she finds out her kids might have been secretly in touch with her late husband all these years.

An autobiographical film based on Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's memories of his youth growing up in Taiwan after emigrating from mainland China.

Three high school students experience the perks and pitfalls of love in director Leste Chen’s sensitive tale of friendship and yearning.

A street vendor with a grim home-life forges a connection with a young woman on her way to Paris.

Three key events during three different time periods, in three seasons, and on three nights culminate to change the life of Zhang Dong Ling.

A delivery boy falls for a young girl who is hearing impaired. Comparing themselves with water birds and trees, together they are going to break the barrier and pursuit their dreams and take their relationship to the next level.

A receptionist at a suicide hotel in Taipei forms a fleeting friendship over the course of one night with a guest who can’t decide if she wants to live or die.

After the uprising at Wushe, Mona Rudao faces a guerrilla war against the militarily superior Japanese and Seediq clans. He and his followers must fight for their dignity and honor so that they can truly be "Seediq Bale" or "real men." Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale - Part 2: The Rainbow Bridge is Part two of the two-part, four-hour Taiwanese edition of the film Warriors of the Rainbow.

In three separate segments, set respectively in 1966, 1911, and 2005, three love stories unfold between three sets of characters, under three different periods of Taiwanese history and governance.

A-yuan and A-yun are both from the small mining town of Jio-fen. They move to Taipei, where A-yuan is an apprentice by day and goes to night school, and A-yun works as a helper at a tailors. Everyone thinks they are meant for each other, and so do they. They fail to see time and fate are beyond their control.

Four school buddies — a director, a temp worker, an insurance salesman and a paper craftsman — grapple with unfulfilled dreams amid middle age ennui.

Set in the late 1980s, this family drama is about an 11-year-old boy who befriends his landlord, nicknamed Old Fox, and learns from him how to survive in a rapidly changing world as well as things his poor father would never be able to teach him.

An alcoholic man and his two young children barely survive in Taipei. They cross paths with a lonely grocery clerk who might help them make a better life.

When Jade, a web-cam girl, visits Takeko's tattoo studio she becomes entranced with the image of the spider lily and with Takeko as well. In order to get closer to the object of her desire, Jade asks Takeko to give her the same lily tattoo, challenging Takeko's monastic existence and opening up memories which threaten to tear the two women apart.

A young man develops severe neck pain after swimming in a polluted river for a movie shoot, but nobody can provide him any relief.

A terminally ill man sets up his best friend, whom he has loved since high school, so that she will not be lonely after he passes away.

Kang lives alone in a big house, Non in a small apartment in town. They meet, and then part, their days flowing on as before.

Two friends who haven't seen each other for thirteen years reunite. One is a successful concert pianist just back from a European tour and the other has just started a new business.

In the final days of the year 1999, almost everyone in Taiwan has died from a strange plague that ravished the island. As rain pours down relentlessly, a single man is stuck with an unfinished plumbing job and a hole in his floor. This results in a very odd relationship with the woman who lives below him.

There was once a young girl named May who felt alienated from everyone around her. May is worried about her mother and father, whose marriage is on the rocks, and she yearns to return to the woods where her grandfather lives. One day, May befriends a boy as lonely as she is. When reality catches up, they run away to a beautiful world that belongs only to them. Both imaginatively escapist and heartbreakingly realistic, their journey speaks to kids and adults alike with the pain of solitude, the sorrow of loss, and the warmth of hope.

Aga, a band singer, returns to Hengchun with frustration. Tomoko is a Japanese model assigned to organize a local warm-up band for the Japanese super star beach concert. Together with other five ordinary Hengchun residents who were not expected to be great or anything, they formed an impossible band.

A loafer inherits an apartment block and lets out the place to a group of tenants, including a lusty gymnastics teacher, a geeky college student, a single father with his young daughter, a gay couple, a writer and a sexy female office worker. An incredible story is about to unfold as they start their lives in the same building.

Over the course of a few days, the paths of a group of young friends, lovers, and acquaintances in Taipei crisscross, prompting them to arrive at realizations about their lives.

Ah-Ching and his friends have just finished school in their island fishing village, and now spend most of their time drinking and fighting. Three of them decide to go to the port city of Kaohsiung to look for work. They find an apartment through relatives, and Ah-Ching is attracted to the girlfriend of a neighbor. There they face the harsh realities of the big city.

Chi earned her American dream after persevering with her studies in Taiwan. Following her grandmothers’ death, Chi returns to her family on Happiness Road, where she begins to feel nostalgic about her childhood and starts to contemplate the meaning of “life” and “home”. What is happiness? Will Chi find her own happiness?

Amid a rapidly changing cityscape, the lives of a disparate group of swindlers, hustlers, gangsters, and expats collide, with a naive French teenager and a sensitive young local who tries to protect her caught dangerously in the middle.

When her mother gets sick, 13-year-old Fen moves back to Taiwan, where she struggles to fit in amid the 2003 SARS epidemic.

A deadly virus outbreak puts a hospital in total lockdown, and various people trapped in the crisis must confront a deluge of agonizing choices.

A Taiwanese drug mule has his foolproof smuggling method thrown out of whack when he catches a ride with the wrong cab driver.

Lin Hsiao-yang tries to keep her family together while working as a waitress at Kentucky Fried Chicken and going to night school. With no mother and her father currently working out of town, it is up to Lin Hsiao-yang to take care of her younger siblings, who are slipping into a life of crime.

Hearing-impaired teenager Chang Cheng transfers to a school for children with special needs. However, the world of the hearing-impaired doesn’t seem quiet at all. When Chang witnesses the game taking place in the last row on the school bus, his excitement about blending into a new environment immediately turns into fear.

A coming-of-age story about a young brother and sister whom spend a pivotal summer in the country with their grandparents.

Master puppeteer Li Tien-lu recalls his life in Japanese-occupied Taiwan during the first half of the 20th century.

After years toiling in bit-parts, an actress finally gets her break with a leading role in a spy thriller. The part is challenging, not least because it calls for explicit sex scenes, and the director is often hard on her. But both the industry and the press think the results are sensationally good.

Kai (Jack Yao), who works at his parent's noodle shop by day and spends his nights in a bookstore to learn French, decides to go to Paris after his girlfriend, who recently left for Paris, dumps him by phone. Then the local neighborhood mafia boss offers Kai a free plane ticket to Paris if he takes a mysterious package with him.

A boy lives with his Grandma and Mr. Lin, the tenant who looks after him and Grandma. But when Grandma passes away, the boy's uncle returns to Taiwan and discovers that ownership of the apartment was transferred to other people.

Set in the island Kinmen, often seen as the most dangerous military base because it’s geographically close to China, "Paradise in Service" follows the adventure of a boy who serves his military service in Unit 831 from 1969 to 1972, in preparation for a war that could erupt anytime. Through an unlucky lottery draw result, Pao, a twenty-something young man from Southern Taiwan has to serve the military in the remote and perilous Kinmen. Moreover, he is assigned to the Sea Dragon (ARB), a unit noted for the toughest physical training. It never occurs to Pao, however, that the greatest challenge in his military service lies not in the Sea Dragon but in Unit 831, a special task he is later appointed to… In this peculiar assignment, Pao vows to keep his virginity against all odds.

The main character of little girl in the story confronts a robbery and strays from the road she is familiar with. After passing a hedge, she enters an unknown world and unfolds a magical adventure depending on senses other than vision and her imagination. With soft and cute colors as the main key, we used simple designs to depict the little girls' imaginary world.

A kung fu fanatic, Yu Ting (Alexander Lo Rei), searching for the ultimate master, saves a young Shaolin monk, Hsu Shi (William Yen), from a group of mobsters and sees it as a golden opportunity to enrich his kung fu skills. He persuades the young novice monk to smuggle him into Shaolin, but Ting's presence isn't welcome and he is driven out, but remains close to the temple, keeping in touch with Hsu Shi. When Ting rescues a girl from the clutches of the Flying Eagle gang, the Golden Wheel Lama and sworn enemy of Shaolin finds the perfect excuse to lead an assault on the Temple. Realizing Ting's devotion, the abbot decides to bring Ting into the Shaolin order and teach him the deadliest techniques to prepare him for the Lama's merciless fury.

A woman is transported into a world as strange and beautiful as her dreams in this fantasy. Singing, who comes from a family of poor shopkeepers, earns her living as a cleaning woman on a ferry that services a military base. Singing has a recurring dream in which she meets a handsome stranger who speaks in language she cannot understand, and one day on the ferry she meets Tsai Hsien-tsung, a soldier who resembles the man in her dreams. The soldier is immediately smitten with Singing, and when the power goes out on the ferry, the two are thrown into a strange netherworld where they sail to South America on a deserted vessel as Singing loses her heart to the military man.