Movies Like A City of Sadness
If you loved A City of Sadness's Drama and History storytelling, these films deliver a similar experience — carefully selected for tone, themes, and emotional depth. Each pick includes where to watch it right now.
★ Top Picks
Radium Girls
Young women toiling in a factory are exposed to hazardous material which takes a disastrous toll on their health.
Munich – The Edge of War
At the tense 1938 Munich Conference, former friends who now work for opposing governments become reluctant spies racing to expose a Nazi secret.
Leap
After 12 years, the Chinese women's volleyball team again reached the Olympic final. The ups and downs of the Chinese women's volleyball team for more than three decades have slowly spread away.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
A story set in 19th century China and centered on the lifelong friendship between two girls who develop their own secret code as a way to contend with the rigid cultural norms imposed on women.
Belfast
Buddy is a young boy on the cusp of adolescence, whose life is filled with familial love, childhood hijinks, and a blossoming romance. Yet, with his beloved hometown caught up in increasing turmoil, his family faces a momentous choice: hope the conflict will pass or leave everything they know behind for a new life.
Oranges and Sunshine
The story of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker from Nottingham, who uncovers one of the most significant social scandals in recent times – the forced migration of children from the United Kingdom to Australia and other Commonwealth countries. Almost singlehandedly, Margaret reunited thousands of families, brought authorities to account and worldwide attention to an extraordinary miscarriage of justice.
Shattered Glass
The true story of fraudulent Washington, D.C. journalist Stephen Glass, who rose to meteoric heights as a young writer in his 20s, becoming a staff writer at The New Republic for three years. Looking for a short cut to fame, Glass concocted sources, quotes and even entire stories, but his deception did not go unnoticed forever, and eventually, his world came crumbling down.
More Movies Like A City of Sadness
Mayerling
Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria clashes with his father, Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, over implementing progressive policies for their country. Rudolf soon feels he is a man born at the wrong time in a country that doesn't realize the need for social reform. The Prince of Wales, later to become Britain's King Edward VII, provides comic relief. Rudolf finds refuge from a loveless marriage with Princess Stéphanie by taking a mistress, Baroness Maria Vetsera. Their untimely demise at Mayerling, the imperial family's hunting lodge, is cloaked in mystery.
Youth
A group of performing art troupe members each face their own trials and tribulations in Chengdu; from escaping a family scandal to dealing with unrequited love, each experiences rejection that shapes their lives.
Richard Jewell
Richard Jewell thinks quick, works fast, and saves hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives after a domestic terrorist plants several pipe bombs and they explode during a concert, only to be falsely suspected of the crime by sloppy FBI work and sensational media coverage.
The Scarlet and the Black
Fr. Hugh O'Flaherty is a Vatican official in 1943-45 who has been hiding downed pilots, escaped prisoners of war, and Italian resistance families. His activities become so large that the Nazis decide to assassinate him the next time he leaves the Vatican.
Platform
China’s rapid changes from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, as seen through the lives of four performers in a theater troupe.
Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants
Under Genghis Khan, the Mongolian army pushes west to destroy the Jin Dynasty, setting its sights on the Song Dynasty next. Amid internal conflicts among martial arts schools, Guo Jing unites the Central Plains' warriors to defend Xiangyang, embodying courage and loyalty in the fight for the nation.
Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale - Part 1: The Sun Flag
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.
Wormwood
In this genre-bending tale, Errol Morris explores the mysterious death of a U.S. scientist entangled in a secret Cold War program known as MK-Ultra.
Skin
Based on the true story of a black girl who was born to two white Afrikaner parents in South Africa during the apartheid era.
Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend
Follow the launch of Lamborghini’s career as a manufacturer of tractors, a creator of military vehicles during World War II, and the designer of Lamborghini cars, which he launched in 1963 as the high-end sports car company Automobili Lamborghini.
Red Sorghum
An old leper who owned a remote sorghum winery dies. Jiu'er, the wife bought by the leper, and her lover, identified only as "my Grandpa" by the narrator, take over the winery and set up an idealized quasi-matriarchal community headed by Jiu'er. When the Japanese invaders subject the area to their rule and cut down the sorghum to make way for a road, the community rises up and resists as the sorghum grows anew.
Why These Movies Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with A City of Sadness (1989): Drama and History themes, similar narrative structure, and comparable emotional depth. NoBadPicks uses a combination of TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface films most likely to resonate with fans of A City of Sadness.
See full details for A City of Sadness (1989)