Goodbye, Dragon Inn | Rotten Tomatoes

Goodbye, Dragon Inn

Released Aug 29, 2003

1 hr. 21 min.

Drama

List

81%

47 Reviews

Tomatometer

73%

1,000+ Ratings

Audience Score

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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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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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

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Ming-liang Tsai

Director

Lee Kang-sheng

Hsiao-Kang

Shiang-chyi Chen

Ticket Woman

Kiyonobu Mitamura

Japanese Tourist

Miao Tien

Self

Lee Yi-cheng

Actor

Show Less Cast & Crew

Show More Cast & Crew

76%

%

Margarita Happy Hour

36%

87%

Illusion

77%

85%

Quitting

61%

61%

Gerry

80%

81%

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles

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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

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

Dennis Harvey

48 Hills

This melancholy, meditative piece is considered one of the greatest Taiwanese films ever.

Feb 11, 2022

Full Review

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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
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

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