Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Martin Bradley A tone poem on the nature of cinema as an entity, an art-form and a place, Ming-Liang Tsai's "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" is unlike almost any other film you will see. To say it will appeal mostly to people who love cinema may not necessarily be true for here is a film that challenges what many people believe cinema should be; entertainment perhaps, something communal and if we view it as a means of expression surely that expression should be more universal than what we get here and yet for many of us, "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" will strike us as being intensely personal. For many, this is a film that will stir up what drew us to cinema in the first place.It's almost totally silent, reminding us that in its infancy cinema was silent. We hear snatches of dialogue from the film within the film, (the martial arts classic "Dragon Inn"), that is being shown in the cinema where almost all of 'the action' takes place but there are no sub-titles. There are only a handful of characters in this cavernous auditorium but they don't communicate. If there is any unification between these people it's through the medium of cinema. There is the lame woman who acts as ticket collector and cleaner, the projectionist, an elderly man and his grandson and a number of gay men who cruise the cinema for sex, (though far from explicit these scenes have a remarkable homo-erotic charge making this an essential gay film), and perhaps a ghost.You could say, of course, that few of these people are there to see the film but were Duane and Sonny there to watch "Red River" in "The Last Picture Show" or was it just a ritual that has to be adhered to as part of a larger scheme, (in their case, growing up; here staving off loneliness). It's also a film about looking; seeing this in a cinema not unlike the one on screen we become part of the experience and it is clear from the extracts from "Dragon Inn" that Ming-Liang Tsai is very much in love with movies.Nothing really happens and the film moves at a snail's pace yet this is the least boring of art-house movies; it's an immersive experience and whether you see it alone or with others, if you have any feeling for cinema at all, you can't fail but to be touched by it though I suspect, for many, it will be like watching paint dry.

Dennis Littrell (Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)This the kind of film you see at an art film festival at some inopportune time after you've already watched twenty films. You start watching it and it seems so boring that you know it can't be THAT boring. You're missing something. You sit up and you concentrate. Nothing happens. There is this woman with a club foot. She sways and totters up and down like a boat caught in waves as she drags her foot down a sparsely-lit corridor. The camera is at one end of the corridor and it records her progress. Then after she is gone, the camera holds on the empty corridor for some long seconds, make that literally minutes, and then cuts to another scene.This time the camera is looking out into a darkened movie theater. There are only a couple of people seated in the red seats. Finally some dialogue. It's from the movie being shown, a kind of sword and warlord melodrama set in the Ming Dynasty. (Actually it's King Hu's Dragon Inn (1967), a martial arts epic--hence the name of this movie). The camera watches the face of one particular viewer. He is just sitting there watching the movie. The camera watches him watching the movie. It watches him watching the movie for a long time.At some later point the guy goes to the bathroom. He's actually a Japanese tourist. He stands next to some other guy at a urinal. Another guy comes in and stands at a third urinal. One guy smokes a cigarette. Some time passes. Then there is another scene. The woman with the club foot is in the bathroom. She opens one stall and flushes the toilet. She opens another stall and flushes the toilet. The camera stays on the scene until she has flushed the last toilet, and then holds on the empty bathroom...At this point you figure out what is going on. This is an anti-film. Everything is backwards. The film maker (Tsai Ming-Liang) is not trying to entertain you, to impress you, or to excite you, or rally you to some cause, dazzle you, invoke your tears, uplift you, scare you, redeem you--no, the film maker is doing exactly the opposite of what film normally tries to do.And then there's another scene, as if to confirm your interpretation. The one guy and another stand in the corridor smoking cigarettes. There is after a bit some words from the second man. He says this theater is haunted. There is no response. He says "Ghosts." No response. The camera now gets a little closer so that you see the men from perhaps a few feet away. Their heads are turned away from the camera so that only the back of their heads and a little bit of the sides of their faces can be seen. The camera holds. No one says anything.And finally near the end of the film after the theater has been closed for the night (actually forever, as this is about the death of the movie house), one guy puts his palm on a fortune telling machine. The machine says, "Enter your question." He punches a button. After a bit, the machine says, "Please take your fortune." A pause, and then the machine kicks out the fortune on a strip of paper. The guy takes it and reads it. And then he leaves. The camera does NOT show his fortune.The part you like best comes at the end as a woman sings a Chinese song about "Half was bitter; half was sweet." Her voice is gorgeous and the melody is engaging. And then the title characters run down the screen.Okay, this film really IS boring unless you are a true student of film, and then you can see that this anti-film about people watching a film is a statement about the film-maker's art. As you leave the theater, now having seen twenty-one films, you declare that this was very interesting, and you know you are going to vote this one higher than some of the others because it so deliberately bored you that you were not really bored at all, compared to some other films that took themselves too seriously and really did bore you. "Interesting," you say to your companion. "Really makes a statement," he says. "Beautiful in a way," you say. "Yes," he says.Suddenly you have an angle on the film. You're thinking, "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" somehow reminds you of the lyric from the Elton John song about Marilyn Monroe. The lyric is, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road." Same thing, you think--or at least the same melancholy idea.

Chung Mo If you are familiar with the avant-garde films of Michael Snow or some of Werner Herzog's more minimalist pieces you'll be prepared for this experience. Snow's signature piece consists of a 45 minute zoom of an entire room into a postcard on a wall while drama occasionally occurs around the postcard. The sense of space is amazing in this film. You really get the feeling of the enormous theater. The "plot" consists of a Japanese man cruising the theater as it seems are a number of other men who all disappear before the projected film is over. Also the box office woman's attempt to give half a steam bun to the absent projectionist. Nobody but two old men and a small child seem to be interested in the movie projected.You have been warned. Also the director seems to have an obsession with men's rooms. The two old actors in the film are interesting however the director sets it up so you question whether the one with the small child is also cruising for men. I don't know if that was necessary.

artist_signal Tsai Ming Liang's recent piece "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" (Bu San) is a film chock full of beautiful color and rich, textured moods. It features the characteristic pacing of Taiwanese film, and it is composed of shot upon remarkable shot of a crumbling movie theatre in its final days, playing the last runs of "Dragon Gate Inn", a martial art classic Dir. by King Hu. Some of the stark imagery lingers, and it is just the pure action of the actors (there is no dialogue in the film for the first 45 minutes) that makes the film a profound stylistic achievement. There are some appearances by the original actors of The Dragon Gate Inn film (Tien Miao, for one); and Tsai Ming Liang's favorite actor Lee-Kang Sheng shows up at the end as the film projectionist. There's also a fine performance by Chen Shiang-chyi, who plays the limping "heroine" of the film, if such a thing exists in this movie. A great film overall, and a cinematic work that tries to say a very heartfelt and melancholic "goodbye" to not only "Dragon Gate Inn", but also to the old cultural and historical values that are perhaps beginning to fade in Taiwan.