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Goodbye, Dragon Inn

Released Aug 29, 2003 1h 21m Drama List
81% Tomatometer 48 Reviews 73% Popcornmeter 1,000+ Ratings
In Taipei, a movie theater is closing, but not before one final film is shown -- "Dragon Inn," a 1967 actioner and the source of nostalgia for the moviegoers and employees in the old, decrepit and possibly haunted building. The workers include eccentric projectionist Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng) and a crippled cashier (Shiang-chyi Chen). The patrons include a Japanese tourist (Kiyonobu Mitamura) and two ghostly actors from the original film who have come to mourn the passing of an era.
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Goodbye, Dragon Inn

Goodbye, Dragon Inn

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Critics Consensus

Deliberately paced yet absorbing, Goodbye, Dragon Inn offers an affectionate -- and refreshingly unique -- look at a fading theater that should strike a chord with cineastes.

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Critics Reviews

View All (48) Critics Reviews
Ela Bittencourt Hyperallergic You'd never think a spacious, mostly empty movie theater could feel so tight. Feb 8, 2021 Full Review Joshua Rothkopf In These Times Tsai Ming-liang's stultifying Good Bye, Dragon Inn captures none of the magic of film despite being set in a movie palace on its final day of operations. Mar 16, 2020 Full Review Richard Brody New Yorker This elegiac 2003 comedy, by the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, is a requiem for a movie theatre. Jun 2, 2014 Full Review William Stottor Loud and Clear Reviews Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a meditative, impactful farewell to a cinema in Taipei and exerts even more resonance when looked at through the lens of the past year. Rated: 4/5 Jul 11, 2024 Full Review Hannah Kinney-Kobre Pittsburgh City Paper Beneath the steely surface of Tsai’s aesthetic, Goodbye, Dragon Inn reveals itself to be full of the little plots that make up life as we understand it... May 9, 2022 Full Review George Elkind Metro Times (Detroit, MI) Discarding plot in favoring a procession of finely evoked resonances with histories political, aesthetic, and personal, all flowing through a shared experience of a memorialized work of art, [it] makes much of seemingly little by attuning itself to loss. Mar 24, 2022 Full Review Read all reviews

Audience Reviews

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Audience Member It amazes me how many critics fawn over Tsai fiilms. Vive L'Amour was ok but The River was dull and this is utter tedium. Two lines of dialogue in the entire film if you don't count the film-within-a-film snippets and enough lllooonnnggg takes of a lame woman walking up stairs and down corridors to last me a lifetime. Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 02/13/23 Full Review Audience Member Tsai Ming-liang's obsession with depiction of loneliness using extended silent shots and very minimal dialogue continues in this spellbindingly forlorn observational playlet set almost entirely in a forsaken old theatre operating for the last night showing the titular movie of yesteryear. Rated 4 out of 5 stars 11/19/17 Full Review Audience Member A haunting, gorgeous and nearly-silent tribute to the experience of cinema-going that perfectly combines melancholy and deadpan humor, with deliberate pacing that may prove too slow to casual moviegoers as it puts sometimes a good deal of emphasis on still moments. Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/14/23 Full Review Audience Member I've saw a Ming-liang Tsai film quite lately. It's one of the absolute slowest films I have seen, but I quite liked it - especially after some weeks of sinking in. Long still shots has that effect. This is the interesting director's tribute to the movie theatre as it takes place in one - a theatre that's about to shut down. It's like a Thai version of Cinema Paradiso. It looks swell, but few or no camera movement kills this one a bit - and I actually tend to dig static films. It's a film being played at the cinema hall, so we get some words from there, but otherwise we get the first spoken, an actual character word, after about 45 minutes. We don't get many more to add to the count. Nothing special goes on as we follow a handful of characters, so it's safe to say it's a demanding film that never gave me much to cheer about. 4.5 out of 10 Asianized 20th century fox intros. Rated 2 out of 5 stars 01/17/23 Full Review Audience Member Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a contemplative mood piece that centers around a moaning, leaking, dilapidated movie theater in order to convey truths about the evolving nature of society and what this process leaves behind. Defined by voyeurism, claustrophobia, and constant rain, the elegantly composed ruin is a home to a handful of filmgoers unbothered by and uninterested in the film projected on the screen, Ming-liang juxtaposing the traditional action film with the more modern existentialism these people feel as they wander around aimlessly inside of the cavernous relic of the past. These people are lost in the constantly progressing world in which current iconography is immediately forgotten, their time in the haunted theater nothing more than a distraction; this gets to the heart of why we go to the movies, commenting on the fact the the world briefly manifests its sense of self in modes of entertainment before moving on, leaving what was in the past forever. Rated 5 out of 5 stars 02/10/23 Full Review Audience Member Watching old wuxia movie in an almost empty old seedy theater. Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/19/23 Full Review Read all reviews
Goodbye, Dragon Inn

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Cast & Crew

Margarita Happy Hour 76% % Margarita Happy Hour Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles 80% 81% Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles Illusion 36% 87% Illusion Quitting 77% 85% Quitting Everyday People 67% 40% Everyday People Discover more movies and TV shows. View More

Movie Info

Synopsis In Taipei, a movie theater is closing, but not before one final film is shown -- "Dragon Inn," a 1967 actioner and the source of nostalgia for the moviegoers and employees in the old, decrepit and possibly haunted building. The workers include eccentric projectionist Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng) and a crippled cashier (Shiang-chyi Chen). The patrons include a Japanese tourist (Kiyonobu Mitamura) and two ghostly actors from the original film who have come to mourn the passing of an era.
Director
Ming-liang Tsai
Producer
Hung-Chih Liang, Vincent Wang
Screenwriter
Ming-liang Tsai
Distributor
Homegreen Films
Production Co
Homegreen Films
Genre
Drama
Original Language
Chinese
Release Date (Theaters)
Aug 29, 2003, Original
Release Date (DVD)
Feb 15, 2005
Box Office (Gross USA)
$34.7K
Runtime
1h 21m
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