This thread is about good and not-so-good Chinese movies.

If you've ever watched a good Chinese movie, and you remember its name, please list the movie below. Also, if you've seen a movie that you didn't like, you can also list that and say why you didn't like it so that the rest of us can skip it.

I haven't seen many Chinese movies. I tried watching "Lust, Caution" last night, but I stopped after it got overly graphic.

The IP-Man movies are pretty good.

Chinese Movies I've watched and like (I have a bias towards music related ones):

Jay Chou's 周杰倫 "Secret" 不能说的秘密
Wang Leehom's 王力宏 "Love in Disguise" 恋爱通告
Kaige Chen's 陈凯歌 "Together" 和你在一起

A friend of mine recommended "Beijing Bicycle", but that left me annoyed at the end. Good if you like unhappy movies (I don't).

Not, a movie, but I am currently watching CCTV's 快乐汉语 Season 1. I find it quite enjoyable, it's targetted at Chinese learner's and the dialog is not dumbed down. You'll have to put up with a bit of overacting though.

There's quite a few that I would consider pretty standard for Chinese learners, such as The Road Home, Raise the Red Lantern, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, etc. Here's a couple lesser known ones I would recommend:

倭寇的踪迹 The Sword Identity. This is a sort of realistic wuxia movie. Really cool.

心急吃不了热豆腐 Eat Hot Tofu Slowly. Takes place in Baoding City, Hebei province, and is filmed mostly in Baoding Dialect, which is really interesting. Maybe I'm partial to it because I used to live in Baoding. In any case it's good.

海洋天堂 Ocean Heaven. A pretty recent movie with Jet Li and Wen Zhang. Kind of a tear jerker.

I enjoyed:

洗澡
飲食男女
女人的天空
變臉王
色戒 (NSFW, or kids)
練習曲 （http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Etude）
那些年我們一起追的女孩
女朋友。男朋友

Okay:
赤壁 （上與下)
愛

There are more, but I can't remember the names. I'll edit when I get a chance.

活着

One of my favourite movies is 人在囧途, or Lost On Journey.

It's so funny, about two guys trying to get home for Spring Festival and things just escalate. I've watched a few Chinese movies and the language on this one isn't too hard to understand.

人在囧途 is pretty hilarious. The sequel came out recently in China, 人再囧途之泰囧, Lost in Thailand. I didn't like it nearly as much as the first one. They did the same thing they did with 画皮二, where they basically take the same actors from the first movie to make the "sequel," except that part two has nothing to do with the first movie. The actors play different roles and the plot is very similar to the original. Meh.

okay, cool, keep them coming

南京！南京！
我11

Nice one!! Here are form the top of my head..

一个都不能少 young rural substitute teacher trying to find a runaway student in the city.

茉莉花开 Three generation of shanghainese women.

我的父亲母亲 Love story of a teacher in rural area. For romantic people only :)

集结号 War movie, comparable to saving private Ryan

饮食男女 (Eat Drink Man Woman)
色，戒 (Lust, Caution)

@WenJun, I really enjoy the English title translation of 饮食男女. It makes it sound a bit cannibalistic.

I enjoyed 洗澡 as well. It's also very suitable in my opinion for beginners since there is not a lot of complicated dialogue.

It's also available as part of the Watch the Move Lern Chinese series: http://www.chinesebookshop.com/english/watch-shower-and-learn-chinese-dvd-book.html

I can highly recommend this series. Additionally to the normal version of the movie (Chinese with Chinese or English subtitles) there is also a shortened one (app. 6 scenes) that have an accompanying booklet with exercises. Most importantly the booklet also includes a full transcript of the movie with annotations of advanced vocabulary, idioms, dialect or cultural allusions etc.

洗澡is recommended for 1500 words and up (seems to be accurate in my experience) and they have also 2-3 other movies that are all 3000 words plus if I recall correctly.

A few that I like, both as films and for language practice, are below. If movies don't have dual language subtitles, I create my own and extend the times of the subtitles a bit. My Chinese isn't good enough to enjoy a movie with just Chinese-only subtitles, but having both is great practice.

Green Tea 绿茶 (2002) - Great director and lead actors, strange surreal romance with lots of very clear easy to understand dialogue. I remember being very excited to understand some whole phrases at the time "你真的喜欢我吗？"

Little Red Flowers 看上去很美 (2006) - a four-year-old boy is forced to conform in post-revolutionary-era kindergarten, although it's not really about that at all.

Lethal Hostage 边境风云 (2012) - pretty amazing gangster/revenge type movie with a terrible English title. Sun Honglei is awesome.

The Message 风声 (2009) - tense espionage drama.

Red Sorghum 红高粱 (1987) - classic, beautiful, bleak.

Not a movie but A Bite of China 舌尖上的中国 (2012) is a wonderful TV series, I have English subtitles for the first 5 episodes (cleaned up versions of those found on YouTube). You can now buy the DVD with English subtitles (I don't know how good they are) at Amazon and from other places.

I also should mention my late brother's favourite: 1993's Kung Fu Master (aka Evil Cult or Lord of the Wu Tang) 倚天屠龙记 - Very over the top Jet Li movie based on one of Louis Cha's popular wuxia novels. The first few minutes seem to cover 100s of years backstory involving about 10 different clans, and the pace picks up from there.

Edit; a few more:

Red Cliff 赤壁 (2008) John Woo's 4.5 hour long historical-ish epic (split over 2 movies) about the Battle of Red Cliffs at end of the Han Dynasty (in about 208AD). Big name actors, thousands of extras, huge budget, action, a few lighter moments, what's not to like?

Warriors of Heaven and Earth 天地英雄 (2003) is one of the better historical fantasy ones, although it tails off a bit at the end.

The Warlords (aka Blood Brothers) 投名状 (2007) - star-studded, and full of fighting and battles, I thought it worked pretty well.

A Woman a Gun and a Noodle Shop (aka A Simple Noodle Story) 三枪拍案惊奇 (2009) is a remake of the Cohen brothers's first movie. It is beautifully shot and but the absurd plot polarises opinions.

right on, it sounds like there are some cool flicks out there

Yes, there are lots of really interesting movies. I added a few more to my post above which are more typical of what people think of as Chinese Cinema.

I can't remember too well which to avoid as I try to forget the bad ones as soon as possible; most of the recent wuxia swords and sorcery type movies with cheap CGI special effects aren't too great. The government sponsored Founding of a Party & Founding of a Republic ones from a couple of years ago bored me to tears.

Thanks to the earlier posters for the other suggestions! Half of them I agree with, the other half I am off to track down...

Did you mention "Curse of the Golden Flower", I thought that was pretty good, dynasty family drama.

Nice thread

我知女人心

让子弹费 - modern action / subtle political commentary, quite fun but I got a bit bored with it about halfway
李献计历险记 - mixed live action / animation, most arty in a good way film I've seen from China. Animation is in a similar style to Waltz with Bashir.
麦兜 - fun cartoon movies from Hong Kong, you can find them dubbed into Mandarin (take a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g36Zsi4FGA to get an idea of the humour)

Inspired by this thread I got some DVD's, the few I could find with 'chinese'. I just watched "Election" about Hong Kong triads, it was quite good, but I didn't catch much of the dialogue, I guess it was mostly in cantonese?

A putonghua version of “Election” is available here at http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjM2OTM5NTY=.html .