Series
Spectacles & Spirits
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
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
DIRECTOR: ANG LEE
2000 / 120min / 35mm -
Dragon Inn
DIRECTOR: KING HU
1967 / 111min / dcp -
Executioners from Shaolin
DIRECTOR: LAU KAR-LEUNG
1977 / 100min / dcp -
Raining in the Mountain
DIRECTOR: KING HU
1979 / 120min / dcp -
A Touch of Zen
DIRECTOR: KING HU
1971 / 187min / dcp