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.

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.

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.

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.

Watching old wuxia movie in an almost empty old seedy theater.

This is one of those movies you are either going to love, or completely hate. It consists of long, slow takes where not much happens, but if you have fond memories of nights in empty theaters watching something with only a few people, Goodbye Dragon Inn is an enjoyable, often humorous film. I found myself laughing quite a bit but not at things normally found in comedies. I don't even know who to recommend this too, but its only 80 minutes and I'd say worth a try for more patient movie fans.

"Goodbye Dragon Inn" is meticulous in every sense of the term. It has a meticulous pace, meticulous characters, and meticulous camera work. It's a movie for the patient. "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" is wonderfully observant, and while I don't think I understood it all, I found myself fascinated by the oddity of it all, and by the ambitions of the characters (and how those ambitions are observed in the camerawork and pace of the film and its 90 seconds+ shots). "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" is Arpke Approved at 4 out of 5 stars

ok direction and idea.. but poor plot/characters

Goodbye, Dragon Inn details the last night of a movie theater before it closes, showing one more film, Dragon Inn. The film is rather evocative as it is a send-off to a dying era and a true appreciation of films as it explores not only the theater itself, but also takes a brief detour to explore its last viewers. It's a love letter to a dying appreciation as well as a dying era. It's a strange, beautiful piece of film-making that will not be for everyone (Especially with such scenes as a woman with a lame leg taking five minutes to walk across the aisle of one of the theaters), but it will bear great significance to those who appreciate cinema as it reflects the feelings of changing times and changing tastes. It won't be for everyone, but I found it to be a compelling film. Be warned, though, it's only for those with a strong stomach for art-house films. But, if you really enjoy films and enjoy some really out there kind of films, you may find something here.

One of the worst movies made in the history of cinema.

Nothing happens and then it's over.

The kind of film most would parody, do not watch if you're not prepared to be challenged.

I watched this 4x faster than the normal speed. That's how slow and uneventful this movie is. When you play it faster, it's an interesting film about a dying cinema theater. It's always sad and depressing to witness a theater dying a slow death.

another example of rating but no review-I always post a review so ty again flixtergrr

Perhaps the first film I think of when I think "minimalism." Might as well have made this a silent film.

If you have watched some film of Ming-liang you know what you can expect, long shots, almost a silent film, that sensation of discomfort, like the scene where a bunch of men are in the bathroom and, for some strange reason, everyone stay still and don't move or the Japanese man that are, with desperation, searching for a gay lover, that he always can generate in us. This picture is three things at the same time: a tribute to the act of going to the movies, a homage to the cult classic film Dragon Inn and a nostalgic way to show the antique movie theaters, a big room and not the small halls that these days lets more profits to exhibitors. Even in the final part one character says to another that no one came to the movies now and i think that's a sort of critic. I found it really remarkable but the final part, the last ten minutes, was a bit boring to me but all in all an amazing film.

A história tem como proposta mostrar a decadência de um grande cinema de rua, no seu último dia de funcionamento, que serve mais para abrigo da chuva do que para exibir filmes. A rotina dos que trabalham somada a tristeza aparente da despedida criam um clima denso em algumas cenas, transmitindo a monotonia das atividades diárias e a solidão do vazio das poltronas. Seus frequentadores, pessoas aleatórias, parecem estar perdidos naquela imensidão, se aproximando uns dos outros para, talvez, não se sentirem tão sós. Imagino o efeito que teria se falasse sobre um dos emblemáticos cinemas de rua que fecharam ao longo dos anos. Grandes salas responsáveis por levar a 7ªarte a milhares de pessoas e que foram largadas/abandonadas aos poucos, sendo substituídas por salas menores dentro de shoppings centers, mas sem o mesmo glamour. É lento, com pouquíssimos diálogos e tem como um dos principais personagens um clássico filme "xao-lin" que está sendo exibido na tela do cinema, o qual poucos dão atenção. As longas cenas contrastam com a curta duração de 1h20, mas são necessárias pra sentir o peso do fechamento das portas do grande templo.

Long takes and minimal dialogue make this one definitely not for everyone. It's a small film about the act of moviegoing, about watching more generally, and halfway through, when the first bit of dialogue occurs that's not in the movie being screened, the whole film takes on an amplified tone of loss and melancholy.

Goodbye Dragon Inn is one of the slowest, most frustrating, hardest sits a film-goer can experience. The film is essentially a series of still frames with slight bursts of movement or action - not all that surprising considering the film deals with a group of people watching the last showing at a cavernous cinema. The film of the night is the wuxia pian classic Dragon Gate Inn, and some of the film's best moments are when the martial arts masterpiece takes center stage, drawing out parallels with the lives and relationships of those in the theater. For the patient viewer, there are certainly rewards to be had in Goodbye Dragon Inn. The film comments on the dearth of audience interest in classic film, particularly in younger generations, as well as the general lack of love for theater-going film-watching. The climate of cinema has changed, in many ways for the worse, and Goodbye Dragon Inn is a love letter to a better time when people knew that film matters.

Tsai's films get lots of plaudits from my favorite critics, so perhaps this deserves some further study. It is almost an experimental film. A cavernous moldy old movie house in Taipei is (apparently) showing its last film -- King Hu's Dragon Inn. We watch people watching the movie, including two of the actors from Hu's film. A real cinema was used and each shot uses arthouse framing and lighting to create almost another world (which doesn't seem that nostalgic for film-goers, but more so for those behind-the-scenes perhaps). Each shot is very nearly static (I wondered if my DVD had frozen at more than one point) and there is little to no dialogue, apart from the characters in Dragon Inn, who are heard and seen askance, directly, muffled through a wall, from behind the screen, and in other indirect ways (kudos to the incredible sound design). I wonder if Tsai's other films place this one in context...