Snow Falling on CedarsMovies like Snow Falling on Cedars
- Key Features:
- Courtroom drama, Racial prejudice, Forbidden love, Small town secrets, Post-war trauma, Murder investigation, Historical setting, Guilt, Moral dilemma, Journalism, 1950s, Betrayal, Redemption, Mystery, Flashbacks
- Tone:
- serious, restrained, dramatic
- Target Audience:
- Drama enthusiasts, Lovers of historical fiction, Viewers interested in social issues, Fans of literary adaptations
- Emotional Arc:
- Intrigue → Suspense → Bittersweetness
Snow Falling on Cedars

In the 1950s, a Japanese-American fisherman is suspected of killing his neighbour at sea. For Ishmael, a local reporter, the trial strikes a deep emotional chord when he finds his ex-lover is linked to the case. As he investigates the killing, he uncovers some startling clues that lead him to a shocking discovery.
Snow Falling on Cedars
A union pensioner and his wife are robbed, but find that merely getting the assailants brought to justice is not enough for their consciences.

New York, 1961. Alexander Ivanov, a high-ranked Soviet bureaucrat, reluctantly defects to the West while is part of a diplomatic mission, feeling the grief of being unable to know the fate of his wife Katya, whom he has had to leave behind in Moscow. Only many years later, in 1991, he will finally find out the truth when his niece Lauren travels to Moscow to participate in a painting exhibition.

Writer Harry Street reflects on his life as he lies dying from an infection while on safari in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro.

The tragic death of a beautiful young girl starts a tense and atmospheric game of cat and mouse between hunter John Moon and the hardened backwater criminals out for his blood.

Four people recount different versions of the story of a man's murder and the rape of his wife.

After a botched robbery results in the brutal murder of a rural family, two drifters elude police, in the end coming to terms with their own mortality and the repercussions of their vile atrocity.

A married Japanese forester during WWII is sent to Indochina to manage forests. He meets a young Japanese typist and promises to leave his wife. He doesn't and after the war, she turns up and the affair resumes.

Harvard Law student Oliver Barrett IV and music student Jennifer Cavilleri share a chemistry they cannot deny - and a love they cannot ignore. Despite their opposite backgrounds, the young couple put their hearts on the line for each other. When they marry, Oliver's wealthy father threatens to disown him. Jenny tries to reconcile the Barrett men, but to no avail.

A shady lawyer attempts a Christmas Eve crime, hoping to swindle the local mob out of some money. But his partner, a strip club owner, might have different plans for the cash.

Private eye Jake Gittes lives off of the murky moral climate of sunbaked, pre-World War II Southern California. Hired by a beautiful socialite to investigate her husband's extra-marital affair, Gittes is swept into a maelstrom of double dealings and deadly deceits, uncovering a web of personal and political scandals that come crashing together.

A teacher lives a lonely life, all the while struggling over his son’s custody. His life slowly gets better as he finds love and receives good news from his son, but his new luck is about to be brutally shattered by an innocent little lie.

Actress Reese Holden has been offered a small fortune by a book editor if she can secure for publication the love letters that her father, a reclusive novelist, wrote to her mother, who has since passed away. Returning to Michigan, Reese finds that an ex-grad student and a would-be musician have moved in with her father, who cares more about his new friends than he does about his own health and well-being.

Spain, 2003. An accidental discovery leads Clarence to travel from the snowy mountains of Huesca to Equatorial Guinea, to visit the land where her father Jacobo and her uncle Kilian spent most of their youth, the island of Fernando Poo.

A newlywed couple cancels their honeymoon and returns to the snowy Midwest to make the funeral arrangements for their best man, who died unexpectedly after their ceremony.

A dishonest insurance salesman's life quickly disintegrates during a Wisconsin winter when he teams up with a psychopath to steal a rare violin at the home of a reclusive farmer.

In 1988, a teenage girl's life is thrown into chaos when her mother disappears.

In Japan's Aokigahara Forest, a troubled teacher meets a mysterious lost stranger who takes him on a life-changing journey of love and redemption.

North Carolina mountains at the end of the 1920s – George and Serena Pemberton, love-struck newly-weds, begin to build a timber empire. Serena soon proves herself to be equal to any man: overseeing loggers, hunting rattle-snakes, even saving a man’s life in the wilderness. With power and influence now in their hands, the Pembertons refuse to let anyone stand in the way of their inflated love and ambitions. However, once Serena discovers George’s hidden past and faces an unchangeable fate of her own, the Pemberton’s passionate marriage begins to unravel leading toward a dramatic reckoning.

Waitress Annie has separated from her suicidal alcoholic husband, Glenn. Glenn has become an evangelical Christian, but his erratic attempts at getting back into Annie's life have alarmed her. High school student Arthur works at Annie's restaurant, growing closer to a new kid in town, Lila, after class. When Glenn and Annie's daughter go missing, the whole town searches for her, as he increasingly spirals out of control.

1991. Harrison Lloyd, a renowned photojournalist covering the war in Yugoslavia, is reported missing. Sarah, his wife, convinced that he is not dead, decides to go to Bosnia to find him.

An American man returns to a corrupt, Japanese-occupied Shanghai four months before Pearl Harbor and discovers his friend has been killed. While he unravels the mysteries of the death, he falls in love and discovers a much larger secret that his own government is hiding.

Stingo, a young writer, moves to Brooklyn in 1947 to begin work on his first novel. As he becomes friendly with Sophie and her lover Nathan, he learns that she is a Holocaust survivor. Flashbacks reveal her harrowing story, from pre-war prosperity to Auschwitz. In the present, Sophie and Nathan's relationship increasingly unravels as Stingo grows closer to Sophie and Nathan's fragile mental state becomes ever more apparent.

The younger brother of an assassinated US President is led down a rabbit hole of conspiracies and dead ends after learning of a man claiming to be the real shooter.

Accused of killing his brother during adolescence, Salvador lives alone in the middle of Patagonia. Several decades later, his brother Marcos and his sister-in-law Laura, come to convince him to sell the lands they share by inheritance.

A man searches for his childhood best friend, a Polish violin prodigy orphaned in the Holocaust, who vanished decades before on the night of his first public performance.

After discovering her father put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared, 17-year-old Ree Dolly must confront the local criminal underworld and the harsh Ozark wilderness in order to to track down her father and save her family.

Shigematsu Shizuma, who lives with his family in a village near Fukuyama, was in Hiroshima with his wife and niece just after the devastating atomic bombing, a tragedy that cruelly took the lives of thousands of people and forever marked the harsh existence of the survivors.

Two detectives are tasked to investigate the murder of an old man, found bludgeoned to death in a Tokyo rail yard.

Shamoto runs a small tropical fish shop. When his daughter Mitsuko is caught shoplifting at a grocery store a man named Murata steps in to settle things between the girl and the store manager. Murata also runs a tropical fish shop and he and Shamoto soon become friendly. However Murata hides many dark secrets behind his friendly face.

As a 13-year-old, fledgling writer Briony Tallis irrevocably changes the course of several lives when she accuses her older sister's lover of a crime he did not commit.

A gentle, war-shattered ex-soldier, Kinji Kameda, arrives in wintry Hokkaidō and is pulled into a volatile tangle of love and pity between the disgraced Taeko Nasu, the proud Ayako, and his possessive friend Akama. Kameda’s saintly compassion exposes everyone’s wounds, steering the quartet toward jealousy, violence, and inexorable tragedy. Adapted from Dostoevsky’s novel.

A young prosecutor in postwar West Germany investigates a massive conspiracy to cover up the Nazi pasts of prominent public figures.

In a rural town in Louisiana, a black Master Sergeant is found shot to death just outside the local Army Base. Military lawyer, Captain Davenport—also a black man—is sent from Washington to conduct an investigation. Facing an uncooperative chain of command and fearful black troops, Davenport must battle with deceit and prejudice in order to find out exactly who really did kill the Master Sergeant.

In the weekend after thanksgiving 1973 the Hood family is skidding out of control. Then an ice storm hits, the worst in a century.

A very gentle middle-aged man is married, but when he falls in love with another woman, he decides that to divorce his wife would humiliate her too much – so instead he decides to kill her.

World War II vet Paul Sutton falls for a pregnant and unwed woman who persuades him -- during their first encounter -- to pose as her husband so she can face her family.

When a prostitute is found dead in a Los Angeles skyscraper occupied by a large Japanese corporation, detectives John Connor and Web Smith are called in to investigate. Although Connor has previous experience working in Japan, cultural differences make their progress difficult until a security disc showing the murder turns up. Close scrutiny proves the disc has been doctored, and the detectives realize they're dealing with a cover-up as well.

Barely escaping an avalanche during a family ski vacation in the Alps, a married couple is thrown into disarray as they are forced to reevaluate their lives and how they feel about each other.

Island of Java, 1942, during World War II. British Major Jack Celliers arrives at a Japanese prison camp, run by the strict Captain Yonoi. Colonel John Lawrence, who has a profound knowledge of Japanese culture, and Sergeant Hara, brutal and simpleton, will witness the struggle of wills between two men from very different backgrounds who are tragically destined to clash.

A woman is suspected of her husband's murder, and their blind son faces a moral dilemma as the sole witness.

A man and a woman meet in the ruins of post-war Poland. With vastly different backgrounds and temperaments, they are fatally mismatched and yet drawn to each other.

Set in the South just after the US Civil War, Laurel Sommersby is just managing to work the farm without her husband, believed killed in battle. By all accounts, Jack Sommersby was not a pleasant man, thus when he suddenly returns, Laurel has mixed emotions. It appears that Jack has changed a great deal, leading some people to believe that this is not actually Jack but an imposter. Laurel herself is unsure, but willing to take the man into her home, and perhaps later into her heart.

John Peterson lives with his partner Eric and their adopted daughter in Southern California. When he is visited by his aging father Willis from Los Angeles who is searching for a place to retire, their two very different worlds collide.

Mike Kendall, a disgraced ex-cop, is fighting a losing battle with the bottle. When he finds a woman left for dead at the side of a road, Kendall turns private eye to track down her killers, taking one last shot at redemption.

A Jewish homicide detective investigates a seemingly minor murder and falls in with a Zionist group as a result.

The story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a teenager in the late 1950s, had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. He alone realizes that Hanna is illiterate and may be concealing that fact at the expense of her freedom.

Two Los Angeles homicide detectives are dispatched to a northern town where the sun doesn't set to investigate the methodical murder of a local teen.

Akira works as a lawyer. One day, he meets with his former client Rie, who asks Akira to perform a background check on her late husband Daisuke.

A Protestant World War II pilot and a Jewish girl fall in love in Jerusalem, even though their diverse backgrounds threaten to pull them apart.

Samuel, a widower, is taking care of his 7-year-old daughter alone. Overwhelmed and stressed out, he decides to isolate in a chalet he was renovating with his wife in the Italian Alps. Indifferent to the anger of locals who help police to hunt down migrants, he comes across a woman who fled Afghanistan. Samuel decides to help her reach the border, thinking it will take them a few hours. But an agressive group of men comes after them…

Tokyo, Japan, 1989. Lucy Fly, a foreigner who works as a translator, begins a passionate relationship with Teiji, a mysterious man obsessed with photography.

War photographer W. Eugene Smith travels back to Japan where he documents the devastating effect of mercury poisoning in coastal communities.

After the murder of his beloved wife, a man in search of redemption is set adrift in a world where nothing is as it seems. On his journey, he befriends slacker Jimmy "The Finn", becomes involved in rescuing his neighbor Colette from her own demons, and gets entangled in a web of deceit full of unexpected twists and turns.

In the aftermath of World War II, a British colonel and his wife are assigned to live in Hamburg during the post-war reconstruction, but tensions arise with the German widower who lives with them.

The coming-of-age tale of 16-year-old Lina Vilkas who is deported to Siberia amid Stalin's reign of terror in the Baltic region during WWII. An aspiring artist, she secretly documents her harrowing journey with her drawings.

Michael ‘Jay’ Cochran has just left the Navy after 12 years and he's not quite sure what he's going to do, except that he knows he wants a holiday. He decides to visit Tiburon Mendez, a powerful but shady Mexican businessman who he once flew to Alaska for a hunting trip. Arriving at the Mendez mansion in Mexico, he is immediately surprised by the beauty and youth of Mendez’s wife, Miryea.

Taking its title from an archaic Japanese word meaning "ghost story," this anthology adapts four folk tales. A penniless samurai marries for money with tragic results. A man stranded in a blizzard is saved by Yuki the Snow Maiden, but his rescue comes at a cost. Blind musician Hoichi is forced to perform for an audience of ghosts. An author relates the story of a samurai who sees another warrior's reflection in his teacup.

A well-to-do husband who allows his wife to have affairs in order to avoid a divorce becomes a prime suspect in the disappearance of her lovers.

A drama focused on the friendship between a high-functioning autistic woman and a man who is traumatized after a fatal car accident.

The Civil War has ended, but Colonel Morsman Carver is on one final mission – to kill Gideon, no matter what it takes. Launched by a gunshot and propelled by rage, the relentless pursuit takes the two men through frigid snow-capped mountains and arid deserts, far from the comforts and codes of civilisation, into the bloodiest recesses of their own souls.

Heiress Joanna Stayton hires carpenter Dean Proffitt to build a closet on her yacht—and refuses to pay him for the project when it's done. But after Joanna accidentally falls overboard and loses her memory, Dean sees an opportunity to get even.

When a schoolteacher is sacked, he projects his bad mood at his troubled teenage son. The son, in turn, buys a CD player from a pawnshop with counterfeit money. This starts a chain reaction of misery as every victim projects his problems on to another person.

At Kichijōji Station, Tokyo, Taku Morisaki glimpses a familiar woman on the platform opposite boarding a train. Later, her photo falls from a shelf as he exits his apartment before flying to Kōchi Prefecture. Picking it up, he looks at it briefly before leaving. As the aeroplane takes off, he narrates the events that brought her into his life...

Haruto Asakura falls in love with hairdresser Misaki Ariake and asks her out. Watching Misaki Ariake work hard to achieve what she wants, Haruto Asakura, who almost gave up his dream to become a photographer, begins to pursue his dream again, but Misaki Ariake is diagnosed with a disease that ages her 10x faster than normal.

Owing to his alleged involvement with communist parties, film director David Merrill is forbidden from working in Hollywood. He decides to fight for his rights and faces numerous challenges.

After his young son dies from the negligence at a hospital, Harry Fertig takes matters into his own hands and kills the doctor, nurse and clerk responsible. Slick lawyer Roy Bleakie, looking only to win a case and not caring of the matters involved, is asked by Fertig's boss to defend him. Shocked to hear that his client wants to plead guilty, the case causes Bleakie to question his own morals by defending an honorable man.

Harper is a cynical private eye in the best tradition of Bogart. He even has Bogie's Baby hiring him to find her missing husband, getting involved along the way with an assortment of unsavory characters and an illegal-alien smuggling ring.

When Holly’s dark secret is accidentally uncovered by her new emotionally unstable neighbor Tom, they are pulled into a violent confrontation with her father, who will do anything to keep the secret hidden.

Homicide detective John Hobbes witnesses the execution of serial killer Edgar Reese. Soon after the execution the killings start again, and they are very similar to Reese's style.

Two families' idyllic ice-fishing vacation turns deadly when they awaken a creature beneath the frozen lake, forcing them to rely on each other if they want to make it safely back to land.

A burglar falls for an heiress as she dies in his arms. When he learns that he has the gift of reincarnation, he sets out to save her.

Remi and Barnes, two very different teenagers, meet by chance in the winter of their senior year, then spend four days together over the course of a year that will change their lives forever.

A woman must fly back to her hometown when her Alzheimer's-stricken mother wanders into a blizzard. The return home forces her to confront her past.

A logger leads a life of quiet grace as he experiences love and loss during an era of monumental change in early 20th-century America.

Set in Genoa, the film concerns the financial struggles and emotional strain that occur after Michele loses his job. He and his wife Elsa are forced to give up their affluent lifestyle and cope with the tensions of moving into a smaller home, finding new work, and making sacrifices.

Police Chief Jesse Stone's relationship with his ex-wife worsens, and he fears he's relapsing into alcoholism. To get his mind off his problems, Jesse begins working on the unsolved murder of a bank teller shot during a robbery. Also, his investigation of an alleged rape draws him into conflict with the town council — which hopes to preserve Paradise's reputation as an ideal seaside resort.

Megan Carter is a reporter duped into running an untrue story on Michael Gallagher, a suspected racketeer. He has an alibi for the time his crime was allegedly committed—but it involves an innocent party. When he tells Carter the truth and the newspaper runs it, tragedy follows, forcing Carter to face up to the responsibilities of her job when she is confronted by Gallagher.

When a father is forced to abruptly depart for work, he leaves his children, Aidan and Mia, at their holiday home in the care of his new girlfriend, Grace. Isolated and alone, a blizzard traps them inside the lodge as terrifying events summon specters from Grace's dark past.

When a young couple goes to a remote wooded lake for a romantic getaway, their quiet weekend is shattered by an aggressive group of local kids. Rowdiness quickly turns to rage as the teens terrorize the couple in unimaginable ways, and a weekend outing becomes a bloody battle for survival.

A college professor finds herself at a personal and professional crossroads when a star pupil levels an accusation against one of her colleagues, and a dark secret from her own past threatens to come to light.

In 1916, a Chicago steel worker accidentally kills his supervisor and flees to the Texas panhandle with his girlfriend and little sister to work harvesting wheat in the fields of a stoic farmer.

While holidaying in the French Alps, a Swedish family deals with acts of cowardliness as an avalanche breaks out.

Felicie and Charles have a whirlwind holiday romance. Due to a mix-up on addresses they lose contact, and five years later at Christmas-time Felicie is living with her mother in a cold Paris with a daughter as a reminder of that long-ago summer. For male companionship she oscillates between hairdresser Maxence and the intellectual Loic, but seems unable to commit to either as the memory of Charles and what might have been hangs over everything.

After World War II, Anita, a young survivor of Auschwitz, becomes involved in an intense and passionate affair that almost shatters her until she gains the strength to start a new life.

Air Force Major Lloyd Gruver is reassigned to a Japanese air base and is confronted with US racial prejudice against the Japanese people. The issue is compounded because a number of the soldiers become romantically involved with Japanese women, in defiance of US military policy. Ordinarily, a by-the-book officer, Gruver must take a position when a buddy of his, an enlisted man, Joe Kelly, falls in love with a Japanese woman, Katsumi, and marries her. Gruver risks his position by serving as best man at the wedding ceremony.

In this drama from director Alan Parker, on-the-lam Jack McGurn flees to Los Angeles and takes a job as a projectionist at a movie theater owned by a Japanese-American man. Jack falls for the owner's daughter, Lily, but they are forced to elope to Seattle when her father forbids the relationship. The couple marry and have a daughter, but when World War II breaks out, Jack is powerless to stop his new family's forced internment.

An FBI agent teams with the town's veteran game tracker to investigate a murder that occurred on a Native American reservation.

A hardened cop tries to unravel the past to discover whether a violent teenager was responsible for the murder of his family. A confused fifteen-year-old runaway becomes enthralled with the young man.

In this French crime film, set during the time of the Gulf War, an elderly German tourist is murdered in Paris by junk dealer Joseph Katz (Pinkas Braun), a friend of Paris detective Sam Bellamy (singer Patrick Bruel). Romantically involved with the victim's daughter Emma Guter (Isabella Ferrari), Bellamy covers up the crime he witnessed. Joseph then mysteriously vanishes, and Bellamy heads for Berlin where the victim's possessions are auctioned. After Bellamy finds the source of the well-hidden traffic in art stolen by Nazis from French Jews, he discovers a Nazi war criminal is blackmailing past associates. Incorporating background from journalist Hector Feliciano's Lost Museum, the film is adapted from Guy Konopnicki's novel, Pas de Kaddish pour Sylberstein (No Kaddish for Sylberstein).

A group of travelers is stranded in a small country inn when the river floods during heavy rains. As the bad weather continues, tensions rise amongst the trapped travelers.

A boozy lowlife tries to bury the truth about his crazy stepson's suspicious death, but a nosy newspaper columnist and the young man's mother complicate matters.

The only U.S. Marshal assigned to Antarctica, Carrie Stetko will soon leave the harsh environment behind for good – in three days, the sun will set and the Amundsen-Scott Research Station will shut down for the long winter. When a body is discovered out on the open ice, Carrie's investigation into the continent's first homicide plunges her deep into a mystery that may cost her her own life.

The arrival of an intimate letter prompts a young woman to bring her mother on vacation to a small Japanese town, where someone special resides.

Behrani, an Iranian immigrant buys a California bungalow, thinking he can fix it up, sell it again, and make enough money to send his son to college. However, the house is the legal property of former drug addict Kathy. After losing the house in an unfair legal dispute with the county, she is left with nowhere to go. Wanting her house back, she hires a lawyer and befriends a police officer. Neither Kathy nor Behrani have broken the law, so they find themselves involved in a difficult moral dilemma.

The wife of a British Judge is caught in a self-destructive love affair with a Royal Air Force pilot.

A thief named Egor, having served a term in prison, goes to the country to meet his pen-friend Lyuba, a kind genial village woman. Egor comes to love Lyuba sincerely. Now he has friends, work and a beloved woman, he decides to break with his criminal past and start a new life. However, his former criminal associates interfere brutally.

Two brothers are trying to find out the truth from years ago. The whole town is against them.

In 1943, a childless couple, the Čížeks, decide to hide a Jewish refugee, David Wiener, the son of Čížek's former employer, in the secret pantry of their apartment. Čížek is aware of the danger into which he has brought his household and his neighbours, but he takes helping his fellow man in need for granted. But at the same time, as a largely unheroic hero, he is dying of fear. His personal situation is greatly complicated by the approaching end of the war, when he faces danger from both the Germans and his "honest" fellow Czechs...

