Goodbye, Dragon Inn

Like Kill Bill, this begins with the Shaw Bros' famous logo and is, in large measure, an homage to the HK action maestro King Hu. But Tsai's cinephilia takes a very different form from Quentin Tarantino's. Set almost entirely in a cavernous old Taipei cinema, where Hu's Dragon Inn is a closing night attraction, it's a movie of long, static shots revealing a near empty auditorium. The only dialogue in the first 40 minutes comes from the onscreen movie. We watch the cashier preparing a dish for the projectionist, then hobbling up to the booth, but she doesn't find him. And then there's the Japanese youth who sneaks in and finds plenty going on in the gents'. Deadpan absurdist comedy segues into conceptualist reverie - onscreen and offscreen space mirror and echo each other so that even the walkouts feel like part of the spectacle.