The best Gong Li’s romance movies

A sweeping romantic epic set in Japan 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.

Women enter and exit a science fiction author's life over the course of a few years after the author loses the woman he considers his one true love.

A three-part anthology film about love and sexuality: a menage-a-trois between a couple and a young woman on the coast of Tuscany; an advertising executive under enormous pressure at work, who, during visits to his psychiatrist, is pulled to delve into the possible reasons why his stress seems to manifest itself in a recurring erotic dream; and a story of unrequited love about a beautiful, 1960s high-end call girl in an impossible affair with her young tailor.

The story of Hong Kong, from New Year's Day to June 30th, 1997, when the British left their colony and turned it over to the People's Republic of China.

Fugui and Jiazhen endure tumultuous events in China as their personal fortunes move from wealthy landownership to peasantry.

A scholar in search of true love. Disguising himself as a houseboy, he indentures himself to a rich family in order to pursue the ravishing servant girl who has stolen his heart.

China 3000 years ago. It's the time of the Qin dynasty. The emperor seeks immortality by busily letting his alchemists search for a formula and building the famous terracotta army from the bodies of outlaws and the condemned. This is the time Mong Tiang Fong and court lady Twon fall deeply in love. Such a thing is not tolerated at the court and when their relationship is discovered both are sentenced to death. In the meantime the alchemists have discovered the formula of immortality, but decide to destroy their work. However Twon gets possession of one immortality pill which she manages to give to Tiang Fong before he's made a terracotta warrior too. China 1930. While on location a film crew discovers parts of the grave of emperor Qin guarded by the terracotta warriors. Tiang Fong, being immortal, awakes...

Set in the decadent 1920s, Temptress Moon tells the very complicated story of a wealthy family living on the outskirts of Shanghai. Their youngest daughter, Ruyi, is brought up as a servant to her opium-addicted father and brother. Meanwhile, her brother-in-law Zhongliang has a successful, if illegal, career seducing and blackmailing married women in the city. When he comes to Ruyi's home the two fall in love, and trouble ensues.

"The Hand" was originally produced as a segment for the omnibus film "Eros" (2004), where it appeared alongside segments by Steven Soderbergh and Michelangelo Antonioni. This standalone Director's Cut version restores 15 minutes of deleted scenes and was produced in 2020 for the Criterion Collection box-set "World of Wong Kar Wai". The film tells the tale of Zhang, a shy tailor’s assistant enraptured by a mysterious client, Miss Hua.

After an accident, a chauvinistic executive gains the ability to hear what women are really thinking.

Zhou Yu, a ceramic artisan in China's rural Northwest, has a deep rapport with Chen Qing, a shy sensitive poet. Taking a long train ride every weekend just to make mad passionate love with him, her longing seems insatiable. Until one day, she meets the hedonistic vet Zhang Qiang and begins a torrid affair, which takes her to another train station, and another level of lust. Driven by the locomotive of love and desire, she hustles through a dark tunnel of no return.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Yu-liang leaves a brothel in a small Chinese town, to become the second wife of Mr. Pan. While Pan is away at the revolution in Yunnan, Yu-liang learns to paint and takes art classes at the Shanghai Art Institute, until it is closed for painting nudes. Because she cannot bear him a son, Yu-liang leaves Pan to his first wife, and studies art in Paris, where she wins an award for a nude self-portrait. She returns to join Pan in Nanking in the 1930's, and becomes a Professor until it is discovered that she came from a brothel. She returns to Paris to live the rest of her life there, and finally gains a major exhibition of her work.