Top 10 Chinese-Language Films of 2020 (Based on Chinese Internet Data)

2020 was a year unlike any other in cinema history. The COVID-19 pandemic shuttered theaters worldwide for months. In China, cinemas closed for 178 days — from late January to late July [citation:7]. When they finally reopened, the industry had to rebuild from scratch.

Despite these unprecedented challenges, 2020 became a landmark year. China's total box office reached 20.4 billion yuan (approximately $3.1 billion), surpassing North America to become the world's largest film market for the first time [citation:5]. The top ten earners were all domestic films — a historic first [citation:3].

But beyond the numbers, 2020 gave us something more precious: a group of films that reflected our shared anxieties, our longing for connection, and our fragile hope.

Here are the Top 10 Chinese-Language Films of 2020, ranked by a combination of Douban scores, critical reception, and cultural impact.

No. 1: A Sun (陽光普照)

• Director: Chung Mong-hong (鍾孟宏)
• Cast: Chen Yiwen, Ke Shuqin, Wu Jianhe, Liu Guanting, Greg Hsu
• Genre: Drama / Family
• Douban Score: 8.5
• Awards: Best Feature, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress — 56th Golden Horse Awards

Verdict: The undisputed best Chinese-language film of 2020. A devastating family epic that makes you feel the weight of every ray of sunlight.

Two brothers. One is the golden child — handsome, smart, loved by everyone. The other is the family's shame — a delinquent sent to a juvenile detention center. When the golden child jumps to his death without warning, the family must reassemble itself around the void he left behind [citation:8].

The film's title is ironic. There is no sunshine in this film — only shadows. But what makes A Sun extraordinary is its refusal to judge. The father who cannot love his remaining son. The mother who buries her grief in work. The younger brother who must become the man his brother never had the chance to be.

The final scene — a son stealing a bike for his mother, riding through a tunnel while she sits behind him — is one of the most quietly devastating endings in recent cinema. This is a film about how families survive. Not triumph. Not tragedy. Just survival.

No. 2: One Second (一秒鐘)

• Director: Zhang Yimou (張藝謀)
• Cast: Zhang Yi, Liu Haocun, Fan Wei
• Genre: Drama / History
• Douban Score: 7.8

Verdict: Zhang Yimou's love letter to cinema. A film about film, about memory, and about what we are willing to risk for one glimpse of the past.

Set during the Cultural Revolution, One Second follows a escaped labor camp prisoner (Zhang Yi) who treks across the desert just to watch a propaganda newsreel. He has heard that his daughter appears in it for one second — her only surviving image [citation:7].

Fan Wei plays the local film projectionist, a man who loves cinema with a technician's precision and a poet's heart. The film's most beautiful sequence is when he teaches the prisoner how to splice film — the tenderness of handling celluloid, the sacredness of moving images.

Like many of Zhang Yimou's recent films, One Second was released in a censored version. The director has confirmed that crucial scenes were cut. Even in its truncated form, it is a moving tribute to the power of cinema — and a quiet protest against the erasure of memory.

No. 3: Balloon (氣球)

• Director: Pema Tseden (萬瑪才旦)
• Cast: Soinam Tso, Yangkali Tso
• Genre: Drama / Family
• Douban Score: 7.9

Verdict: The best Tibetan-language film of the year. A delicate meditation on tradition, modernity, and a woman's right to choose.

Set on the Tibetan plateau, Balloon follows a family whose lives are upended when two condoms — used as balloons by their children — burst. The mother discovers she is pregnant again. According to Tibetan Buddhist belief, the fetus may be the reincarnation of her late husband's mother. To abort would be a sin. To keep it would destroy her family's already precarious finances [citation:8].

Director Pema Tseden (Wanma Caidan) uses the balloon as a central metaphor — a red sex toy floating over the grasslands, a symbol of both liberation and absurdity. The film is quiet, observational, and deeply feminist without ever announcing itself as such. The final shot — a red balloon drifting into the sky, untethered — is perfect.

No. 4: The Eight Hundred (八佰)

• Director: Guan Hu (管虎)
• Cast: Wang Qianyuan, Zhang Yi, Jiang Wu, Huang Zhizhong
• Genre: War / History
• Douban Score: 7.6
• Box Office: 3.11 billion yuan [citation:5]

Verdict: The film that saved Chinese cinema in 2020. The first blockbuster to be released after the pandemic shutdown, it reignited audience passion for the big screen.

Set in 1937 during the Battle of Shanghai, The Eight Hundred tells the story of 400 Chinese soldiers defending a warehouse against the Japanese army. They claimed there were 800 — to intimidate the enemy and boost morale [citation:7].

The film is massive in scale — hundreds of extras, elaborate set design, visceral battle sequences. But what makes it memorable is its willingness to show the horror of war. Soldiers blow themselves up with grenades to stop Japanese sappers. Young boys die holding the flag. Civilians watch from across the river, unable to help, unable to look away.

Guan Hu's film became a cultural phenomenon — the movie that proved audiences would return to theaters. It also became a lightning rod for criticism, accused of historical distortion and nationalist propaganda. Regardless of where you stand, The Eight Hundred is an extraordinary cinematic achievement.

No. 5: Wet Season (熱帶雨)

• Director: Anthony Chen (陳哲藝)
• Cast: Yeo Yann Yann, Koh Jia Ler
• Genre: Drama / Romance
• Douban Score: 7.6

Verdict: A quiet, heartbreaking portrait of loneliness, desire, and the limits of restraint.

A Malaysian-Chinese teacher in Singapore is trapped. Her marriage is loveless. Her father-in-law is dying. Her students mock her. And she is quietly, devastatingly lonely. Then a student — a bright, troubled boy who stays after class — begins to see her not as a teacher, but as a woman [citation:8].

Wet Season is the opposite of a Hollywood romance. Nothing is glamorized. The affair, when it happens, is awkward and sad. The teacher knows she is risking everything — her career, her marriage, her sense of self. But she does it anyway, because loneliness is its own kind of desperation.

Yeo Yann Yann, a Malaysian actress, delivers one of the year's best performances. Her face, even in stillness, conveys oceans of pain. This is a film about what happens when the rain never stops — and whether, finally, it can wash you clean.

No. 6: My Prince Edward (金都)

• Director: Wong Oi-lam (黃綺琳)
• Cast: Stephy Tang, Chu Pak Hong
• Genre: Drama / Romance
• Douban Score: 7.7

Verdict: The most underrated Hong Kong film of 2020. A sharp, funny, and painfully real look at marriage, independence, and the weight of expectation.

"Golden Metropolis" (Jindu) is a wedding mall in Hong Kong — floor after floor of bridal shops, photo studios, and banquet halls. It is the heart of Hong Kong's marriage industry. And it is where our protagonist, Fong, works.

Fong is about to marry her boyfriend of seven years. But she has a secret: years ago, she entered a fake marriage with a mainland Chinese man to help him get a Hong Kong ID. She has never divorced him. As her wedding approaches, she must find her fake husband — and, in the process, confront her own ambivalence about marriage itself [citation:8].

The film is a quiet feminist statement. Fong is not sure she wants to get married. She is not sure she wants children. She is not sure she wants anything that society tells her she should want. My Prince Edward gives her space to be uncertain — and that uncertainty is the most radical thing about it.

No. 7: Suk Suk (叔·叔)

• Director: Ray Yeung (楊曜愷)
• Cast: Tai Bo, Ben Yuen
• Genre: Drama / Romance / LGBTQ+
• Douban Score: 7.7

Verdict: A gentle, courageous film about elderly gay men in Hong Kong finding love at the end of life.

Two men. Both in their 60s. Both married to women. Both have spent their entire lives hiding who they are. They meet by chance. Slowly, tentatively, they fall in love [citation:8].

Suk Suk (the Cantonese term for "uncle") is radical in its ordinariness. The men are not glamorous. They cook, they eat, they drive each other to doctor's appointments. Their love is expressed in small gestures — a shared soup, a gentle touch on the arm.

The film is also a critique of Hong Kong's housing crisis. The men cannot be together because neither has a place of his own. They meet in parks, in public bathrooms, in the back seats of cars. This is not a love story about passion. It is a love story about survival — and about the small, quiet dignity of refusing to die without having loved.

No. 8: Almost a Comedy (半個喜劇)

• Director: Zhou Shen, Liu Lu (周申/劉露)
• Cast: Ren Suxi, Wu Yuhan, Liu Xun
• Genre: Romantic Comedy / Drama
• Douban Score: 7.4

Verdict: The year's sharpest romantic comedy. A film that asks: how much of yourself are you willing to give up for love?

Three friends. One tangled romantic mess. Sun Tong is a young woman trying to build a career in Beijing. Zheng Duoduo is her fiancé — wealthy, entitled, and unfaithful. Liu Tong is Zheng's roommate — a nice guy who is hopelessly in love with Sun Tong.

Almost a Comedy starts as a standard romantic comedy — misunderstandings, mistaken identities, bedroom farce. But then it pivots. Liu Tong is offered a promotion — but only if he marries his boss's daughter. Sun Tong discovers her job depends on staying with Zheng. Suddenly, the comedy becomes a drama about how far ordinary people will go to survive in a city like Beijing.

The film's title is perfect. It is almost a comedy. But it is also almost a tragedy. And that in-between space is where most of us live.

No. 9: My People, My Homeland (我和我的家鄉)

• Directors: Ning Hao, Xu Zheng, Chen Sicheng, Yan Fei, Peng Damo, Deng Chao, Yu Baimei (寧浩/徐崢/陳思誠/閆非/彭大魔/鄧超/俞白眉)
• Cast: Ge You, Huang Bo, Fan Wei, Shen Teng, Ma Li, Wang Baoqiang, Liu Haoran
• Genre: Comedy / Drama / Anthology
• Douban Score: 7.4
• Box Office: 2.83 billion yuan [citation:5]

Verdict: The year's feel-good blockbuster. Five stories about China's rural transformation, told with warmth, humor, and genuine emotion.

A sequel to 2019's My People, My Country, this anthology of five stories takes place in different regions of China — Beijing, Zhejiang, Shaanxi, Liaoning, and Guizhou. Each story tackles rural poverty alleviation — but in the hands of China's best comedy directors, the results are surprisingly entertaining [citation:7].

The best segment is Fan Wei's The Last Lesson, directed by Xu Zheng. Fan plays an elderly Chinese teacher living in Switzerland who, after a stroke, reverts to his memories of teaching in a rural village decades ago. The villagers stage a "re-creation" of his last lesson. It is sentimental, yes. But it is also genuinely moving. Fan Wei, one of China's most beloved character actors, deserves all the praise.

No. 10: Leap (奪冠)

• Director: Peter Chan (陳可辛)
• Cast: Gong Li, Huang Bo, Wu Gang, Bai Lang (the real Lang Ping's daughter)
• Genre: Sports / Drama
• Douban Score: 7.3
• Box Office: 840 million yuan [citation:5]

Verdict: The story of China's most beloved sports team — the women's national volleyball team. Gong Li gives one of her most physical performances.

Leap follows the Chinese women's volleyball team across four decades — from their first world championship in 1981 to their gold medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics. Gong Li plays Lang Ping, the legendary player-turned-coach. Bai Lang — Lang Ping's real-life daughter — plays her mother as a young athlete [citation:7].

The volleyball sequences are thrilling. Director Peter Chan films them like action scenes — fast cuts, slow motion, the breathless tension of match point. Gong Li, known for her interior performances, transforms herself physically. She walks like Lang Ping. She stands like Lang Ping. She shouts like Lang Ping.

But the film is also about China's changing relationship with nationalism. The early scenes are pure propaganda — athletes sacrificing everything for the motherland. The later scenes are more ambivalent — athletes wrestling with what they have given up, questioning whether the glory was worth the cost. It is not a perfect film. But it is an honest one.

Honorable Mentions

Jiang Ziya (姜子牙) — Douban 6.8, Box Office 1.6 billion yuan. The follow-up to the record-breaking Ne Zha was visually stunning but narratively uneven. It aimed for philosophical depth — questioning whether sacrificing one innocent life to save millions is justified. Audiences were divided.

The Sacrifice (金剛川) — Douban 6.5, Box Office 1.12 billion yuan. Directed by Guan Hu, Guo Fan, and Lu Yang, this Korean War drama was rushed into production to meet a commemorative release date. The result is uneven but moving, with a final sequence (shot from the enemy's perspective) that is genuinely innovative.

Shock Wave 2 (拆彈專家2) — Douban 7.5. Released in late December, this Hong Kong action film almost made the top ten. Andy Lau and Lau Ching-wan deliver two of the year's most charismatic performances. The opening sequence — a terrorist bombing of a subway station — is spectacular.

Final Thoughts

Looking back at 2020, several trends stand out:

The year of family trauma — A Sun, One Second, My Prince Edward, Suk Suk — the best films of 2020 were about families falling apart and struggling to stay together. Maybe, after a year of lockdown, we all needed to see our own domestic tensions reflected on screen.

Hong Kong films find new ground — My Prince Edward, Suk Suk, Shock Wave 2 — Hong Kong cinema in 2020 was diverse, ambitious, and deeply rooted in local realities.

The pandemic shaped everything — Not just the box office, but the themes. Films about isolation, about being trapped, about longing for connection — these resonated more than usual.

Documentary goes mainstream — The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru (which director Fang Li sold his house to make) and A Little Red Flower — audiences were hungry for real stories, told honestly.

Which 2020 Chinese-language film stayed with you? Let me know in the comments.

Tom De · The Movie Prince 🎬