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[...] The nagging pressure of sex separates the ageing Fu-Ho from the idealised cinema of a child's memory, a popular cinema seen at its prelapsarian pinnacle. The movie is only an afterthought for most of the contemporary theatregoers, pushed and pulled about by carnal need. [...]

The fanfare that opens Goodbye, Dragon Inn is followed by a comedown crash. The prologue gives us a vision of the Fu-Ho in its heyday, but immediately afterwards we encounter a Fu-Ho that’s anything but Grand. It’s just another underpopulated declining urban theatre on the eve of a ‘Temporary Closi…

[...] these yearnings exist within a larger yearning. Their unquenched desire echoes Tsai's own desire for the popular cinema of his youth - and not just the movies, but everything that goes along with them: the big neighborhood cinemas, the communal culture of family moviegoing, the family itself,…

At this moment, it was these Pacific Rim filmmakers from territories in what has sometimes been referred to as Greater China - here, Tsai and Yang's Taiwan and Wong's Hong Kong - who seemed poised most precisely and precariously on the edge of contemporaneity, who seemed best situated to explain wh…

How can cinema be dead when business is booming? This depends on how we define cinema. Jones builds a contrast between 'audiovisual spectacle', that 'succession of ruthlessly calibrated, wind tunnel-tested, wholly interchangeable slabs of worldwide entertainment that roll of the assembly line year …