The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, May 4-10
Dragon Inn (1967)
Directed by King Hu
That Tsai Ming-liang picked Dragon Inn to stand for the crumbling grandeur of a bygone age of moviegoing gives some sense of the scale of Hu’s wuxia epic—though prior to Janus’s new 4K restorations of this and Touch of Zen, cinephiles not lucky enough to catch them projected in rare 35mm at BAM two years ago just had to project an aura of myth onto the kinds of bootleg-quality YouTube streams that remain the lot of even peak works from unfancied canons. (Frankly, you were better off catching glimpses of it in Goodbye Dragon Inn and imagining the rest.) Dragon Inn is frankly Sergio-Leonean. The set-up, as several mysterious strangers arrive at the titular remote mountain outpost, is built on silences and glances as lingering and suspenseful as in any super-sized spaghetti saloon sequence; Hu also shoots the great outdoors (the high-altitude setting is all windblown evergreens and rock-strewn dry creekbeds) at low angles, the better to emphasize the expansive sky. The martial arts action has its fair share of wirework and daggers caught with chopsticks, but also long duels captured by an athletic camera and accompanied by an excitable score. It seems, indeed, a momentous artifact. Mark Asch (From May 6, showtimes daily, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center)