Critic Reviews

• Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune

  A weird, funny, melancholy tribute to movies and movie-going, an opus for film geeks that rang my personal bell.

• G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle

  Idiosyncratic, oddball movie that is both funny and moody.

• Wesley Morris, Boston Globe

  This is one of the most gorgeous and maturely composed movies you'll see this year.

• Erik Lundegaard, Seattle Times

  Tsai is hugely popular with film critics, I believe, in part because film critics actually have something to do while watching his films. While the girl is limping down the hallway, we can take notes. Regular theatergoers? They can only watch helplessly.

• Andrew Sarris, New York Observer

  The real star of the movie is the doomed movie house itself, and the dominant subtext is the emotional transaction between the viewer and his (or her) more vividly vicarious adventures projected on-screen.

• Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

  What really sticks with you is the picture's aura of twilight vibrancy, and the deep pleasure Tsai takes in savoring subtle emotions that other filmmakers might not even register.

• Kelly Vance, East Bay Express

  What's the matter with these people? Why are they such a bunch of zombies?

• Jason Gorber, Film Scouts

  Long, boring shots. Reallllly long boring shots. Woman walks up stairs, woman walks down stairs. The end. Bleh.

• Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews

  Plays as a meditation on the deep feelings felt by the viewer and the filmmaker towards the movie experience.

• Rob Thomas, Capital Times (Madison, WI)

  It's not a sentimental ode to the cinema like "Cinema Paradiso." It's more like "Cinema Purgatorio."

• James Verniere, Boston Herald

  A marvelously subtle variation on the theme of the haunted house.

• Sean Axmaker, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  ... at once an elegy for the communal experience of cinema-going and another quintessentially Tsai portrait of loneliness and isolation.

• Shlomo Schwartzberg, Boxoffice Magazine

  Hypnotic in effect but ultimately rather irritating, Goodbye, Dragon Inn will entice those viewers who like oblique, allusive cinema.

• Tom Dawson, BBC

  Tsai Ming-Ling's bitter-sweet Goodbye Dragon Inn isn't easy to categorise: an exercise in cinematic minimalism, it's a ghost story, a deadpan comedy, and a lament for an earlier era of film-going.

Read all 14 critic reviews