CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

boardbryce I can certainly understand others comments about this film being dull and uninteresting. However, I find it refreshing that a director has taken the risk in creating a film as neutral as this. At a glance, the plot is extremely simple. But I find each of the characters to be intriguing as they each have so many tells. I also enjoyed the parallels between the film in progress and the interaction between viewers in the theater. All sense of emotion has been left at the door in the creation of this film, and the soundtrack is barely existent. The photography was phenomenal, and the transitions between scenes were fantastic. I suggest you not think of this as a movie at all, but rather a work of art.

William J. Fickling In over a half century of movie-going, I don't recall ever seeing a film like this. Whether you love it or hate it--I loved it--depends entirely on individual tastes. So I could fully understand someone rating it as either a 10 or a 1, or anywhere in between.The films happenings, or lack thereof, have been adequately described by other reviewers, so I won't go into that here. This is a film in which very little happens, but at the same time everything happens. It is elegiac, and a spirit of sadness and melancholy pervade the film. Many reviewers have criticized the length of some of the takes. A handicapped young woman who appears to have a brace on her leg--we can't see it, but we can hear it--climbs a long flight of stairs with excruciating slowness. The camera watches her from a distance as she climbs every step, with a 'clunk' every time her foot lands on a step. It sounds boring but it's ingenious. How better to empathize with this woman, to realize with a shock what an excruciating grind her daily life must be, and how lonely she must be. Indeed, everyone in the film appears to be lonely, and each has mechanisms for staving it off. Going to the movies is one of them.One much-discussed scene has the camera, apparently from the vantage point of the screen, look out at the completely empty theater for what is probably three or four minutes. Absolutely nothing happens. But this scene is the essence of the film. It seems to be saying, "look at the history here. Look at how many thousands of people have come here to watch the movies, how many were made happy, if only for a couple of hours. And now it will be gone." We know in our gut that the theater will probably be torn down and replaced with a soulless mall, or a parking lot.I'm sure this film brought back memories for people of a certain age. I remember as a child in the 1950s going to theaters very much like this one, paying 9 cents for admission, buying some popcorn and soda, and watching westerns or films noirs. And now those theaters, like the one in this film, are long since gone. Does anyone remember Jean Luc Godard in the 1960s talking about "cinema language?" A film like this one exemplifies perfectly what he must have meant. 9/10

noralee "Good Bye, Dragon Inn (Bu san)" is something of a Taiwanese "Cinema Paradiso" and "Last Picture Show" in its love of old movie theaters and evoking the unfulfilled longings we project onto movies and their showcases.We take refuge (and I have no idea how we were supposed to know that one of the characters we are following in is a Japanese tourist, per the IMDb plot description) during a rain storm on the last night at a huge theater, and the camera slowly leads us through every inch of the place. The vast scale of the place is brought home to us (and it will have less impact when not seen on a big screen) as virtually every inch is navigated painfully by a lame employee, clumping (as we only hear ambient sounds) up and down all those stairs, from the red velveteen seats around every nook and cranny and down long hallways and seedy passageways.I don't know if only a Western viewer thinks at first one character is a pedophile or another a transvestite, as the theater certainly looks like the old ones that were in Times Square, or if writer/director Ming-liang Tsai is toying with all of us, as he brings other assignation attempts closer (in what must be the longest time any men have ever spent leaning against a urinal), but they are as unreal as the movie-within-a-movie, the swordplay flick "Dragon Inn" which is just a bit more stilted and corny than the current "Warriors of Heaven and Earth (Tian di ying xiong)."There is one especially lovely moment, within beautiful cinematography throughout, of reaction to the flickering screen when the employee pauses in her rounds to look up at the huge image of the warrior princess and shares our view of the screen with her. Amusingly, the only fulfilled feelings are hunger, as various characters noisily eat a wide variety of refreshments. The projectionist is as much an unseen power as Herr Drosselmeier in "The Nutcracker," as we don't even see him until the theater is almost ready to close. He is as oblivious to interacting with real people as every other member of the sparse audience. The major events in the film are when two characters even acknowledge each other's existence, let alone speak the only three lines or so of spoken dialogue in the entire film, reiterating what we've seen visually -- "No one goes to the movies anymore." The closing nostalgic pop song is jarringly intrusive at first to this quiet film, but the lyrics are very appropriate.

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.