It's sweltering outside, and this is the cheapest place on earth to buy DVDs, so turn up the air conditioning and immerse yourself in Chinese cinema with this guide to our favorite Chinese flicks of the past decade.

Best Noir

Suzhou River 苏州河
Directed by Lou Ye | 2000

This film begins with one of our favorite visual representations of Shanghai. The narrator, who, echoing Russian director Dziga Vertov’s silent film of 1929 Man with a Movie Camera, is identified only by what he sees, rides a barge down Suzhou Creek.

The montage of the crumbling walls and garbage strewn alleys could be classic gentrification porn but, through choppy French New Wave editing and grainy film, director Lou Ye (better known for 2006’s Summer Palace) manages to give the destruction a vitality that makes it seem like a process of creation. The plot is basic noir “cherchez la femme”—a motorcycle thug looks tirelessly for the former lover he was forced to kidnap and then abandon.

Like Vertov’s representation of the Ukrainian city Odessa, or Godard’s Paris, Lou Ye’s Shanghai brims with cinematic material. Peng Xiaolian, a filmmaker living and working in Shanghai and the director of Shanghai Story, reminds us that great artists steal. “I liked Suzhou River,” she says. “though Lou Ye borrowed a lot from other movies. So what? He made his movie.”

Of special interest here is how the director deals with space. Rarely is the camera on solid ground. It is either filming from the back of a speeding motorcycle or from the upper stories of dilapidated buildings. And, although the grit of Zhabei is right around the corner from The Bund and Lujiazui, the only shot of those promising districts comes at the end of the film, when it is all too late.

You might also like: Summer Palace 颐和园 (2006), Spring Fever 春风沉醉的夜晚 (2009), Purple Butterfly 紫蝴蝶 (2003)

Best Taiwanese Film

Yi Yi 一一
Directed by Edward Yang | 2000

This epic portrayal of life in Taipei reminds us of the great bourgeois case studies of the past centuries: Gustave Flaubert’s Bovarys and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Bookended by a wedding and a funeral, Yi Yi presents a multivalent account of modern life. Most endearing is the youngest son, Yang Yang, who views the world through a second-hand camera.

It is remarkable how Edward Yang structures his shots. Early in the film, when the family has arrived at a hospital after a wedding party (a relative has had a stroke) the actions of different groups are replicated for the camera by way of different reflective surfaces. By overlapping the actions of different family members, we see the responses to a universal theme—tragedy—manifest in a single shot. Yang reminds us that all of humanity is imbedded in the most quotidian human dramas. That said, this beautiful film is quite long and hard-going.

You might also like: Eat Drink Man Woman 饮食男女 (1996), Peach Blossom Land 暗恋桃花源 (1992)

Best Arthouse

Still Life 三峡好人
Directed by Jia Zhangke | 2006

This elegy of disappearance focuses on two people searching for missing spouses just upstream of the Three Gorges Dam, and it revels in absence and displacement. San Ming is a stoic coal miner from Shanxi looking for his long-estranged wife. He discovers that her old house is under water, as is much of the town, and he stays on to work in a demolition crew. Meanwhile, San Hang is looking for her husband, who gave her the wrong mobile number when he left town two years before.

Much of Still Life comprises slow tracking shots of the massive demolition efforts along the shores of the Yangzte. “There isn’t a commercial shot in the film,” says Leo Fang, a Shanghainese film and television actor. “There is no point at which Still Life caters to the audience.” This is true, but for all the misery and desperation, glimpses of friendship and magic keep the film above water. A singing boy wanders in and out of the shots, and scenes of meal times illustrate the growing friendship between the construction workers. Still, it’s hard not to be depressed when San Ming finally meets his wife. Both characters are unable to express their feelings or negotiate the tide of emotions that is sweeping in to drown them, as the waters rise behind the Three Gorges Dam.

You might also like: Blind Shaft 盲井 (2003)

Best Comedy

Kung Fu Hustle 功夫
Directed by Stephen Chow | 2004

If you stuffed a Shaw Brothers ’60s kung fu flick, Buster Keaton and Singing in the Rain into a blender, then cranked it up to full speed, you’d still fall short of this lively, cartoonish physical comedy from Stephen Chow (director and actor of countless Hong Kong comedies, such as King of Comedy and Shaolin Soccer).

Set in ’40s Shanghai, the film follows two bumbling wannabe gangsters as they accidentally start a turf war between the surly residents of a tenement complex and the triad Axe Gang that wants to take it over. If you’re a fan of any form of Chinese cinema, this movie sends it up, either in artful homage or goofy parody, while creating a number of great set pieces that stand in their own right.

Jud Willmont, a 14-year Shanghai resident and the filmmaker behind the recent documentary about the Chinese punk scene, Down: Indie Rock in the PRC, applauds Kung Fu Hustle simply for being so much fun. “A lot of the time Chinese cinema takes itself too seriously, which makes this fun and entertaining movie stand out more,” he says.

Unlike so many other films, Kung Fu Hustle does not use CGI as a crutch, but instead as a tool for great visual gags which makes its cast of neighborhood yokels seem worthy of a classic Warner Brothers cartoon. Chow’s movies work well because he never goes for the easy, simple gag, but instead pushes everything over the top. Watching it, it’s impossible not to crack into a smile.

You might also like: Come Drink with Me 大醉侠 (1966), The One Armed Swordsman 独臂刀王 (1967), King of Comedy 喜剧之王 (1999)

Best Martial Arts

Hero 英雄
Directed by Zhang Yimou | 2002

Zhang Yimou is famous in the West for his early dramas, such as Raise the Red Lantern, but his most commercially successful films have been huge historical martial arts epics. Hero stands out because it cranks the intensity of the genre’s usual effects past the point of comfort until the experience becomes hallucinatory. A retelling of the story of the Qin dynasty’s unification, the film follows a nameless official (Jet Li) who meets the Emperor to collect a bounty on three vanquished assassins. While the official describes the battles he fought, the Emperor becomes wary of a plot against him.

Hero represents the moment when the Fifth Generation of directors tried to take Chinese film international. Critics applaud the film for its stunning set design, which recreates the look of a Chinese fantasy book. We jump through time, space and spectacular sets in grand, operatic form that is at once art house and action.

From the dueling assassins dancing between raindrops to the sequence of an army’s arrows falling in unison, the film turns what could have been a simple martial arts action flick into something as surreal as a work by Terry Gilliam or Salvador Dalί.

You might also like: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon 卧虎藏龙 (2000), Curse of the Golden Flower 满城尽带黄金甲 (2006), Red Cliff 赤壁 (2008)

Best Satire

Devils on the Doorstep 鬼子来了
Directed by Jiang Wen | 2000

Jiang Wen's dark comedy, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2000, is set during the Japanese occupation and tells the story of a villager who is forced to harbor a captured Japanese soldier and his Chinese translator. What begins as a comedy of errors escalates into a frightening prognosis of the human condition under duress. Filmed in black and white, Devils lampoons Chinese B-movie tropes and complicates the roles of victims and perpetrators.

By the end of the movie, you care about both the captured Japanese solider and the Chinese villagers. This empathy makes it all the more uncomfortable once the jokes stop and the beheadings begin. The film is a far more nuanced reading of the roles of the Chinese and Japanese, of soldiers and peasants during the war, than Chinese cinema usually provides, something that blacklisted its director for many years (though Jiang’s back now and making mainstream hits such as Let the Bullets Fly, which tore up local cinemas last winter.

Rachel DiNitto, a scholar of East Asian Cinema at the College of William and Mary in the U.S., was “surprised to see a willingness to consider the complicated nature of victim/aggressor in a Chinese film about Japanese aggression. I hope the film is a sign that a more nuanced discussion of the war can take place.”

You might also like: Good Men, Good Women 好男好女 (1995), In the Heat of the Sun 阳光灿烂的日子 (1994), Let the Bullets Fly 让子弹飞 (2010)

Best Coming-of-Age Movie

Beijing Bicycle 十七岁的单车
Directed by Xiaoshuai Wang | 2001

Even 10 years later, Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle continues to be a moving story as well as a critical, bottom-up view of life in a dynamic, modern Chinese city. The film tells the story of Guo, a 17-year-old country boy who arrives in Beijing, where he takes up work as a bicycle courier. When his prized bicycle is stolen, the ensuing search leads him to its new second-hand owner, Jian, a local Beijingren working though vocational school, dealing with girls and his family’s own financial troubles.

As the boys fight over the bicycle, they discover mutual aspects of their shared existence at the bottom of the financial pile. Their struggle becomes a question of who deserves to make it and be happy in this fiercely harsh society.

As unvarnished as Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neo-realist classic, Bicycle Thieves (which surely inspired it), this coming-of-age story shows off the best the Sixth Generation directors have to offer by exploring the darkest aspects of Chinese social consciousness.

You might also like: Beijing Bastards 北京杂种 (1993), The World 世界 (2004)

Best Romance

In the Mood for Love 花样年华
Directed by Wong Kar-Wai | 2000

Between the martial arts dystopia of Ashes of Time and the reckless kaleidoscope of Chungking Express, Wong Kar-Wai probably has the most diverse film resume of any Chinese director. But it’s his stylish, seductive 2001 period feature In the Mood for Love that tops all. Living in the qipao-draped days of ’60s Hong Kong, two strangers (cinema legends Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung) discover that their partners are having an affair. What follows is a wonderfully stylized tale of longing, which has not been topped since in either Eastern or Western cinema. From the super-saturated photography to the lush soundtrack, Wong uses every one of his trademarks. But the real draw is the two leads who boil with emotion. Shanghainese actor Leo Fang comments that, by relying so heavily on images and music, it’s like a silent film. “Also, it taught me the importance of eye contact,” he says. “The actors and actresses say everything with their eyes.”

You might also like: 2046 (2004), Comrades: Almost a Love Story 甜蜜蜜 (1996)

Best Action

Infernal Affairs 无间道
Directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak | 2002

We bet you've seen this Hong Kong classic many times, but it really is one of the only great pieces of action cinema to come out of HK in the past 10 years, so we had to include it.

The golden days of Hong Kong crime dramas were the ’80s and ’90s, when John Woo and Ringo Lam created ultra-violent triad dramas such as The Killer, A Better Tomorrow, Hard Boiled and City on Fire. By the turn of the century, the great talents had departed for Hollywood and Hong Kong action films had become bland vehicles for Cantopop stars. The glaring exception is Infernal Affairs, directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. Okay, so it too stars a Cantopop king (Andy Lau) but this tangled story of the cat-and-mouse game played by an undercover cop and a corrupt policeman is hard-boiled, unsparing and unrelentingly brutal. Watching it is like being pistol whipped for two hours by an underworld enforcer.

The film spawned two decent sequels, both of which retain the same directorial duo, and a Hollywood remake—Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, which won Best Picture at the 2007 Oscars. The Hong Kong original is better. It’s a twisted character study of misplaced allegiances, loyalty and corruption with the requisite dose of doomed romance that always finds its way into Hong Kong action cinema. The genre is a strange mix of exploding skulls and maudlin sentimentality, and we love it for all its eccentricities.

You might also like: A Better Tomorrow 英雄本色 (1986), City on Fire 龙虎风云 (1987), God of Gamblers 赌神 (1989), Hard Boiled 辣手神探 (1992)

Best Drama

Tuya’s Marriage 图雅的婚事
Directed by Wang Quan’an | 2006

Forsaking the usual subject of the city for the desolate, rural inner-Mongolian steppe, this is a story about scraping by in the harshest of environments and whether or not love can have a place there as well. When her husband’s disability threatens her children’s survival, Tuya must decide whether to divorce him and go with one of the two suitors courting her, one a bumbling neighbor and the other childhood acquaintance-turned-millionaire. This isn’t an exotic travelog. The environment here is a hard, barren one that doesn’t ennoble the people living there. Instead, these characters, capable of such acts of pettiness and jealously, are easy to relate to, giving the viewer a window into a part of China that too rarely makes the screen. In addition to its drama, the film has a subtle comic quality, drawing humor from some of the more challenging aspects of the steppes. If you think Chinese cinema seems a bit one-note, see this film.

You might also like: The Wayward Cloud 天边一朵云 (2005), Oxhide 牛皮 (2005)

Did we miss your fav Chinese flick? Give us the lowdown on your awesome finds in the Chinese movie scene down below