Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang's art-house curiosity isn't for everyone, but serious film buffs will find this spare, elegant tone poem echoing in their minds long after they leave the theater. On a dark and stormy night, a young Japanese man (Kiyonobu Mitamura) takes shelter in a run-down movie theater that's closing that same evening. A handful of moviegoers have turned out to see the last picture show, King Hu's seminal martial-arts picture DRAGON INN (1966). The front row is occupied by a small boy and his elderly grandfather (Miao Tien), who bears a strong resemblance to one of the film's characters (who is, in fact, played by the same actor, nearly 40 years younger). A few rows behind them, another star of Hu's film, Shih Chun, quietly gazes up at his younger self. A heavily made-up woman munches loudly on pistachio nuts, and several middle-aged men seem to be paying more attention to each other than the movie. The Japanese man notices, and begins cruising the room; his search takes him into the cinema's labyrinthine hallways, where he bumps into another young man who informs him that the theater is haunted. Meanwhile, in her small booth at the theater's entrance, the crippled ticket clerk (Chen Siang-chyi) eats her evening meal, making sure to leave half for the projectionist (Lee Kang-sheng). They've never met in person, and before the theater closes she's determined to see him face-to-face. Several times during the film she makes her way to the projection booth, but keeps missing her elusive coworker. Eventually the movie ends and she throws open the doors, revealing an empty auditorium; were any of the moviegoers real, or is the theater really haunted? The ticket clerk shuts off the lights and heads out into the night, and the projectionist finally appears to lock up the cinema one last time. It would be an understatement to describe this film as slow-paced: Ming-liang relies almost exclusively on static shots — some held for what feels like an eternity — and most of the sparse dialogue comes from the movie within the movie. But for a certain kind of passionate moviegoer, Ming-Liang's spookily contemplative film is hypnotic, evoking the primal pleasure of moviegoing and the addictive voyeurism of watching a film with a crowd. The notion of a theater filled with ghosts is also hugely compelling, and should resonate with any movie lover who's ever watched a film in a nearly empty auditorium. Though the film's deliberate pace is sometimes frustrating, it casts a quietly powerful spell and the memory of its images lingers provocatively long after they've flickered into darkness. --Ethan Alter
