Movies Like Signal Fires of Shanghai

If you liked Signal Fires of Shanghai (1944), a drama and history movie directed by Hiroshi Inagaki and Griffin Yueh Feng, here are 20 movies with a similar feel, based on TMDB's recommendations. Each one links to its cast, trailer and where it's streaming.

1
Chûshingura (1962)
★ 7.1/10Also history and drama
After their lord is tricked into committing ritual suicide, forty-seven samurai warriors await the chance to avenge their master and reclaim their honor.
2
Suffragette (2015)
★ 7.2/10Also drama and history
Based on true events about the foot soldiers of the early feminist movement, women who were forced underground to pursue a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an increasingly brutal State.
3
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2011)
★ 6.1/10Also drama and history
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.
4
Radium Girls (2020)
★ 6.6/10Also drama and history
Young women toiling in a factory are exposed to hazardous material which takes a disastrous toll on their health.
5
Munich - The Edge of War (2021)
★ 6.9/10Also drama and history
At the tense 1938 Munich Conference, former friends who now work for opposing governments become reluctant spies racing to expose a Nazi secret.
6
11 Rebels (2024)
★ 6.9/10Also drama and history
When the brutal Boshin War breaks out in Japan, a group of inmates on death row unite to defend a fortress against the Imperial army.
7
Oranges and Sunshine (2010)
★ 6.9/10Also drama and history
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…
8
Rurouni Kenshin Part I: Origins (2012)
★ 7.5/10Also history
In 1868, after the Bakumatsu war ends, the ex-assassin Kenshin Himura traverses Japan with an inverted sword, to defend the needy without killing.
9
Samurai Marathon (2019)
★ 6/10Also drama and history
When feudal lord Itakura Katsuakira decides to prepare his samurai troops for the onslaught of modernization by having them compete in a marathon, his independent-minded daughter Yuki secretly joins the race.
10
55 Days at Peking (1963)
★ 6.9/10Also history and drama
Diplomats, soldiers and other representatives of a dozen nations fend off the siege of the International Compound in Peking during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. The disparate interests unite for survival despite competing…
11
The Rosa Parks Story (2002)
★ 7/10Also drama and history
A seamstress recalls events leading to her act of peaceful defiance that prompted the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.
12
Sekigahara (2017)
★ 7/10Also history and drama
The background to and depiction of a watershed battle in Japanese history, at Sekigahara in 1600, when Tokugawa Ieyasu's Army of the East defeated the Army of the West of Ishida Mitsunari. The story includes the…
13
47 Ronin (2013)
★ 6.2/10Also drama
Kai—an outcast—joins Oishi, the leader of 47 outcast samurai. Together they seek vengeance upon the treacherous overlord who killed their master and banished their kind. To restore honour to their homeland, the…
14
Hounddog (2008)
★ 6.5/10Also drama
A drama set in the American South, where a precocious, troubled girl finds a safe haven in the music and movement of Elvis Presley.
15
Viceroy's House (2017)
★ 6.7/10Also drama and history
In 1947, Lord Mountbatten assumes the post of last Viceroy, charged with handing India back to its people, living upstairs at the house which was the home of British rulers, whilst 500 Hindu, Muslim and Sikh servants…
16
13 Assassins (2010)
★ 7.3/10Also drama
A bravado period action film set at the end of Japan's feudal era in which a group of unemployed samurai are enlisted to bring down a sadistic lord and prevent him from ascending to the throne and plunging the country…
17
Mansfield Park (2007)
★ 6.1/10Also drama
Fanny Price is sent to live with her wealthy relatives, the Bertrams, where she is treated poorly by most except her cousin Edmund. Her life is complicated by the arrival of the worldly Mary and Henry Crawford
18
Shattered Glass (2003)
★ 7/10Also drama and history
Stephen Glass is a staff writer for the respected current events and policy magazine The New Republic and a freelance feature writer for publications such as Rolling Stone, Harper's and George. By the mid-90s, Glass'…
19
Bushido (2024)
★ 7.4/10Also drama and history
Kakunoshin, renowned for his skills with a sword and in the game of go, embodies the samurai code. Falsely accused of a theft, he is forced to become a lowly ronin. Years later, when a case of missing gold pulls him…
20
Ran (1985)
★ 8/10Also drama and history
Shakespeare's King Lear is reimagined as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan where an aging warlord divides his kingdom between his three sons.