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It's a good thing that most of the characters in Tsai Ming-liang's films seem to be compulsive smokers. The acclaimed Taiwan-based director is the master of the long, slow reveal that keeps camera movement to an absolute minimum. Just as frozen are his actors, who sit or stand or lie with that familiar art-house look of longing in their eyes, which often resembles nothing so much as a slight case of constipation. Were it not for the constant lighting of cigarettes and the smoke wreaths wafting through the frame, Tsai's scenes would be hard to distinguish from photographs.

From the man who takes the motion out of motion pictures comes his latest movie, Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Tsai opens this radical experiment in minimalist extremes in the middle of a ferocious rainstorm; the night before it is scheduled to be closed, a grand old Taipei theater is showing the landmark 1966 kung fu film Dragon Inn to a scattered handful of ghostlike characters, including a young Japanese tourist (Mitamura Kiyonobu) apparently cruising for gay men. The crippled, young ticket taker (Chen Shiang-chyi) stalks the venue in search of the mysterious projectionist (Lee Kang-sheng)—perhaps she's in love with him, or maybe he just forgot to return her Jay Chou CD. Narrative details aren't Tsai's concern; he wants to make the audience work for their cinematic enrichment. Tsai trusts in his images—Chen limping down a lonely corridor, the cavernous theater filled with little more than smoke—to evoke the fading experience of moviegoing in an age of pirated DVDs and PlayStations.

The result, however, is a pretty strong argument for steering clear of the local movie house. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is unbearably inert. It's not so much that Tsai has neglected to craft a good story and characters; that's always been his style. What Goodbye lacks is exactly what Tsai's far superior 2001 film What Time Is It There? had in every frame: authentic feeling. Instead of the emotion that suffused the earlier movie—however artfully repressed—in Goodbye we get minutes-long still shots of an empty theater. There are occasional flashes of Tsai's skill for silent comedy, but the payoffs shrivel beneath the lumbering weight of the setups. The film is full of atmosphere—it positively leaks it, like an old, worn-down movie house leaks light—but it has little else. Watching Goodbye is like facing off in a staring contest with the director. Except in this case, everybody loses.

Yet the film was Taiwan's pick for the 2003 foreign-language Academy Award, and hence is a perfect symbol of what's right and wrong with the island's film industry. Mostly freed from commercial pressure thanks to government support, the island's handful of directors have carte blanche to experiment and explore. They have produced some innovative cinema, but there's a reason why none of the eight Taiwan films made last year grossed more than $30,000 in Taiwan. Without the blatantly populist tradition that keeps even Hong Kong's indie directors grounded, filmmakers like Tsai seem to feel little need to connect to the audience on any level. That's a recipe for the kind of movies that exist only to be shown at foreign-film festivals. At the end of Goodbye, a character walks out of the theater and sadly remarks to his companion, "No one comes to the movies anymore." In Taiwan, at least, it's not hard to see why.

• Bryan Walsh
• Minimalist master Tsai Ming-liang tests even his devoted fans' patience in Goodbye, Dragon Inn