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Goodbye Dragon Inn
Universal acclaim
Based on 16 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 11 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy | Drama | Foreign
Written by: Tsai Ming-liang
Directed by: Tsai Ming-liang
Release Date:
Theatrical: September 17, 2004
DVD: February 15, 2005
Running Time: 81 minutes, Color
Origin: Taiwan
Language(s): Mandarin (with English subtitles)
Summary
RATING: Not Rated
Starring Lee Kang-Sheng, Chen Shiang-Chyi, Mitamura Kiyonobu, Miao Tien, Shih Chun, Yang Kuei-mei, Chen Chao-Jung, and Lee Yi-Cheng
On the last night before the old movie theater is shut down, a Japanese youth, despite the hard rain, comes running into the theater. The theater seems empty, void of life; yet there are some people, and some may not be people... (Wellspring Media)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: The River The Wayward Cloud What Time Is It There?
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
This is a funny, sad, stunningly smart movie about the end of movies, made in Tsai's inimitable, unblinking style. No movie lover should miss it.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
Has a quiet, cumulative magic, whose source is hard to identify. Its simple, meticulously composed frames are full of mystery and feeling; it's an action movie that stands perfectly still.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
For all its minimalism, Tsai Ming-liang's 81-minute masterpiece manages to be many things at once.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
A movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
A droll gem that celebrates movie love with feeling and deadpan humor.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
A weird, funny, melancholy tribute to movies and movie-going, an opus for film geeks that rang my personal bell. A bizarre minimalist epic that will either transport or infuriate, it's defiantly, exquisitely eccentric.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Tsai Ming-Liang always makes you feel that there's a world of life beyond his movies -- a world populated by ghosts that are as real as we are.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
It could all be done much more efficiently, but any other approach would lose Tsai's unique mix of stone-faced comedy and dewy-eyed lyricism.
Read Full Review >New York Post V.A. Musetto
A loving tribute to cinema by Tsai Ming-liang, one of Taiwan's most accomplished and popular directors.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
At once an elegy for the communal experience of cinema-going and another quintessentially Tsai portrait of loneliness and isolation.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle G. Allen Johnson
An idiosyncratic, oddball movie that is funny and moody.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
Tsai's film is not free of longueurs, but like much modern work in almost every field, these stretches are deliberate assaults on conventional expectation.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ethan Alter
Though the film's deliberate pace is sometimes frustrating, it casts a quietly powerful spell and the memory of its images lingers provocatively long after they've flickered into darkness.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Richard James Havis
An elegy for the days when Taiwan was a major East Asian film production center.
Read Full Review >Variety David Rooney
This feels like short film material stretched exasperatingly thin but nonetheless casts a certain sad spell, graced by moments of droll observational humor.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 5.3 (out of 10) based on 11 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Matt J gave it a0:
Total crap.
Panda gave it a0:
This movie makes no sense, there were a few funny moments but a complete waste of time nonetheless. Who stands in front of the urinal for 15 minutes and makes people watch that crap?
Brandon P. gave it a0:
This is not a film about the end of movies. This is the end of movies. This is a film where the director stops caring about his audience, in place of lazy pretentiousness. This is a case of a writer so confidant that critics will read deeply into his film that he creates no actual meaning at all. This is the case of editors giving up on appropriate timing and rhythm so much so that it creates a visual representation of nails on a chalkboard. And if you really think a limping woman walking up stairs for an extended period of time is that funny, than you have a very dull sense of humor. Hollywood’s films may have become stale, but we should not react to it by giving praise to this kind of crap. Finally, the inside of a movie theater is the single least interesting location for an audience to watch while sitting in a movie theater. I love film, I love independent film and I love foreign film, but this is the single worst movie I have ever seen. I am almost offended that this was made at all.
Chad S. gave it an8:
It's an amusing gambit to make a movie about going to the movies when the film-within-the film is going to be of more interest to the average moviegoer...in Taiwan. An international festival audience, however, sits in admiration at how Taiwanese cinema has matured since their pop-entertainment days of martial arts epic, without understanding that those days were halcyon. I suspect that Tsai Ming-liang's films are more popular abroad, as are the filmographies of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang. Late in the film, two old men commiserate over how people don't attend the movies anymore, and "Goodbye Dragon Inn" is just the sort of film to keep them away. This film could be construed as a self-criticism of a formalist director's failure to enrich his own people's lives with stories they can relate to. It was the author Sherman Alexie who made me first aware that the high-end of non-white artists are not popular with their own people. Alexie, a Native-American, had said that "all of his ancestors were illiterate," and that his fanbase are largely white, middle-class women. The key to getting anything out of "Goodbye Dragon Inn" is to project yourself as one of the film's patrons. Don't be you, be them.
moses l. gave it a9:
One of the best of 2004, a tribute to the end of cinema and movie going before film became digital, and images on the screen and sounds behind the projector are essences of another time.
Clint H. gave it a10:
Beautiful and haunting.
Damon C gave it a9:
This film, slow as it may be, is hilarious in many parts. There are just so many unexpected moments, satirically observed, analogous to how a murderer would stalk his prey, but in an arch B movie way. On the other hand, every characters is so real that there is a documentary feel to it - but of course, the very deliberateness of the framing and the stillness subvert that reading. Ultimately, the cumulative effect is one of longing, for something lost, for something never to be found alive again. It is a beautiful tribute to the past heroes of cinema, who are now merely ghosts slowly fading into celluloid.
