The best Lee Kang-Sheng’s drama movies

Defying his parents, disaffected youth Hsiao Kang drops out of the local cram school to head for the bright lights of downtown Taipei. He falls in with Ah Tze, a young hoodlum, and their relationship is a confused mixture of hero-worship and rivalry that soon leads to trouble.

Hsiao-Kang, now working as an adult movie actor, meets Shiang-chyi once again. Meanwhile, the city of Taipei faces a water shortage that makes the sales of watermelons skyrocket.

On a dark, rainy night, a historic and regal Taipei cinema sees its final film: 1967 martial arts feature "Dragon Inn". As the film plays, the lives of the theater's various employees and patrons intersect, and two ghostly actors arrive to mourn the passing of an era.

A watch salesman meets a young woman soon leaving for Paris, they forge an instant connection. He changes all the clocks in Taipei to French time.

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

A young man develops severe neck pain after swimming in a polluted river; his dysfunctional parents are unable to provide any relief for him or themselves.

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.

Hsiao-Kang, a Taiwanese film director, travels to the Louvre in Paris, France, to shoot a film that explores the Salomé myth.

Forest fires burn in Sumatra; a smoke covers Kuala Lumpur. Grifters beat an immigrant day laborer and leave him on the streets. Rawang, a young man, finds him, carries him home, cares for him, and sleeps next to him. In a loft above lives a waitress. She sometimes provides care and attention. More violence seems a constant possibility. They find another man abandoned on the street, paralyzed. They carry him. While no one speaks to each other, sounds dominate: coughing, cooking, coupling, opening bags; music and news reports on a radio, the rattle and buzz of a restaurant. It's dark in the city at night. We see down hallways, through doors, down alleys. Who sleeps with whom?

A girl (Shiang-chyi Chen) looks for a street vendor in Taipei. But she can't find him since the Skywalk is Gone.

A lurid fantasy of wounded flesh and accursed lives that entwine and separate in a building run by a landlord (Simon Yam), who seeks to find a particular type of tenant for the property he inherits from his relatives. Driven by his desire of peeping into the darkest aspects of human nature, what he sees through the eyes of the omnipresent cameras ain’t pretty… but it gives him the wry, abject satisfaction of a dark god lording over and leering at the souls of the damned, his imagination hungering toward them.

In the final days of the year 1999, almost everyone in Taiwan has died from a strange plague that ravished the island. Supposedly spread by cockroaches, the disease sends its victims into a psychosis where they act like the insects and eventually die. The two protagonists live In a crumbling apartment building right above and below each other. The woman is on the lower floor, and the pipes above her apartment are leaking fiercely, threatening to destroy her food supply, not to mention her sanity. She calls a plumber to go check it out, and he accidentally pokes a hole through the floor of the man's apartment. The two have never met before, and they come into contact through the hole.

A Korean girl at a party disguisedly as a porno actress. An overly ambitious Nepalese man. A Vietnamese far from home. An Okinawa-born filmmaker in debt. A non-stop ensemble film about people surviving in Osaka.

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.

Somewhere on the coast of Taiwan is Hotel Iris, a mouldering seaside establishment run by a cold and thrifty Japanese woman (Nahana) and her lonely half-Taiwanese daughter Mari (Lucia). One night, Mari hears the cries of a woman from the upper floors. Heading up to investigate, she witnesses a distraught woman in a red camisole dress escape an impeccably dressed but violent man (NAGASE Masatoshi) whose cold voice is entrancing. Mari’s initial shock turns into a strange fascination which drives her to follow the man to discover more about him. He is a translator who lives on an isolated island one can only reach by boat and rumours swirl around him and recent murders. The closer she gets to the man, the more a hidden layer of Mari’s personality awakens as she allows herself to be engulfed by his strange passions…

A Japanese porno actor, HIV positive, commits suicide. Natsumi, a popular porno actress who has often worked with him, learns that she is also HIV positive and becomes desperate. She receives mysterious post cards at times from Taiwan, and decides to go to Taiwan to solve the mystery. The latest film by director PAN Chih-yuan of “The Touch of Fate”, which brought him multiple nominations at the Golden Horse Awards. LEE Kang Sheng, Golden Horse Awards’ Best Actor winner, plays the leading role. Co-star HATANO Yui gives a wonderful performance in her debut feature.

Ah Jie lost everything in the stock market due to a severe economic crisis. He spends his days in his sealed apartment, smoking joints and looking after the marijuana plants that he secretly grows in his wardrobe. In desperation, he calls a suicide helpline and gets to know Chyi, whose sweet and gentle voice causes him to fall in love with his fantasized image of her. He tries to ask her out but is repeatedly rejected. He begins projecting his fantasy of Chyi on Shin, the new girl working at the betel nut stall downstairs. Shin is always sexily dressed in order to lure male customers. Ah Jie becomes closer to her and soon the two of them sink into a world of erotic and psychedelic pleasures. At the same time, Ah Jie begins to stalk Chyi.

A Buddhist monk walks barefoot and incredibly slowly through Marseille – so slowly, that his progress is barely perceptible and he becomes a calming influence in the midst of the town’s goings-on.