Goodbye, Dragon Inn

In a Taipei movie palace on a dark, rainy night, the final screening is underway before the doors close for good. A handful of patrons and a few remaining employees sit through King Hu's 1967 martial arts classic Dragon Inn. Among them is a young Japanese man who has stepped in out of the downpour, while the projectionist and the ticket woman work in the same building yet keep missing each other. Two older men in the seats bear a striking resemblance to performers from the film on screen.

Tsai Ming-liang directed and wrote the film, the fifth of the thirteen features listed for him, following What Time Is It There? from 2001 and preceding his contribution to To Each His Own Cinema in 2007. Lee Kang-sheng plays the projectionist and Chen Shiang-Chyi the ticket woman, with Kiyonobu Mitamura as the Japanese visitor. Miao Tian, Shih Chun and Chen Chao-jung appear as themselves, tying the setting to the earlier wuxia production being shown.

The film runs 82 minutes and was produced in Taiwan by Homegreen Films, with Vincent Wang and Hung-Chih Liang as producers. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.1 from around 7,100 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.8 from a much smaller pool of 189 votes, a gap that reflects how much more widely it has been seen and rated by the larger site's users.