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Series

Spectacles & Spirits

December 31 to January 13

Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn is, among many other things, a eulogy to the popular film culture of its director’s youth, as represented by King Hu’s 1967 Dragon Inn aka Dragon Gate Inn, a watershed work in the wuxia genre and in the cinema of Taiwan. To accompany Metrograph’s re-release of Tsai’s yearning, lovely, quietly comic film, we present a program of some of the best high-flying, quick-striking, sword-swinging wuxia films—historical martial arts movies whose cultural presence in Greater China is roughly equivalent to that of the Western in the United States, or the samurai drama in Japan, in which heroes and quite a few heroines are found routinely defying the laws of gravity and all physical probability in the heat of righteous, bloodstained combat. A hot shot of pure adrenaline and fluttering cinematic euphoria, and the only real superhero movies that have ever been made.

Previously Screened