Don’t worry, Chicken Little, the sky will never fall: The coming of sound didn’t kill the movies, the rise of digital video didn’t kill the movies, the dada tricks of Lars von Trier didn’t kill the movies, and neither did the insults of George Lucas – though “Attack of the Clones” left a nasty flesh wound.

But just for the heck of it, let’s say the art of cinema were to suddenly keel over and die this weekend (that sound you just heard was Anthony

Lane uncorking the bubbly) and a mourning New Yorker wished to pay respects. He’d feel obliged to catch the big picture show, “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” – Angelina Jolie immortalized by the apocalyptic glow! Strange thoughts fill the mind.

Our grieving cinephile could shake off the shivers with the B-movie tonic of “Cellular,” then gorge on the chromatic feast of “Hero.” He might feel relieved, at least, that the passing of cinema means no more self-righteous clunkers from John Sayles. He might choose to spend the afternoon weeping at Film Forum: Cinema gave us Murnau.

Finally, he would stop by Cinema Village to see “Goodbye, Dragon Inn,” and exit the theater utterly beguiled: Tsai Ming-liang bid the art goodbye with a magnificent swan song, gave the world a sublime last film.

Thank God(ard) the apocalypse isn’t now – I’d have been bummed to miss “Blade 3.” But it’s hard not to think of Mr. Tsai’s masterwork in valedictory terms, or to feel that the cinema could come to a marvelous end right here. This is a movie about movie going – the greatest I know – inextricably tied up with death and reincarnation.

Set almost entirely inside a decrepit Taipei movie house on the night of its final show, “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” is a peculiar kind of haunted-house movie. Employees, patrons, and ghosts trace paths through the flickering darkness of the theater. They have gathered, somewhat improbably, around the fading flame of “Dragon Inn,” a classic swordplay flick by the great King Hu.

The two main characters spend most of their time not watching the movie. A wordless, gimpy cashier (Chen Shiang-chyi) clomps through the damp hallways in search of the projectionist, with whom she wishes to share the remainder of her evening snack. A young Japanese man (Kiyonobu Mitamura) sits back in his seat, dodging a pair of bare feet propped up on his right, glaring at a pair of lip smacking customers behind. He spends most of his evening cruising, and being cruised by, various gay men who prowl around the darkened room.

Released from worldly desire, the ghosts are free to enjoy the film. An old man (Miao Tien) watches his younger incarnation up on screen; another cast member from “Dragon Inn” sits nearby, eyes welling with tears. A woman watches from the back, loudly cracking sunflower seeds between her teeth. The scraps at her feet imply a ticket good for all eternity.

That, more or less, is the “plot.” It’s a movie with a situation, or environment, rather than a narrative. A different kind of filmmaker would add psychodrama to the projectionist’s melancholy odyssey, the Japanese man’s anxious erotic quest, the origin and purpose of the phantoms. Mr. Tsai isn’t interested in filling up space, either aesthetically or dramatically, but in emptying it out; he makes us enter the movie.

Leaning in, soaking up his long, quiet images and meticulous sound design (a pianissimo of raindrops, footfall, and muffled King Hu sound track), we mirror the characters in search. What we find is ourselves, the true subject of the film, in the act of watching a movie. “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” draws the art of our own lives.

Significantly, the final image releases us from this conceptual coup back into the world. The cashier abandons the theater, propping an umbrella against a heavy downpour. Let the sky fall: “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” shelters.

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“Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence” is a more familiar kind of ghost story. Android cop Batou and his partner Togusa track glitchy “gynoid” sexbots through the expected dystopian megalopolis, encountering various simulacrum and existential conundrums along the way. Do androids dream of electric sheep? What is the matrix? How rad is my gun?

Mamoru Oshii’s follow-up to his superb 1995 anime is easy on the eyes and obnoxious on the ears. The images speak for themselves – stunningly rendered cityscapes; sleek, uncanny automatons; monumental phantasmagoria – but the movie just won’t shut up. “The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control – and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. … It is hyper real, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.”

Actually, that’s not Batou but Baudrillard – same diff. Zone out the philo-sci-fi claptrap and the visually splendid “Innocence” may be regained for the non-geek.

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One night at a Parisian dinner party, cinematographer Babette Mangolte found herself in the company of Pierre Laymarie, one of the actors (or rather, non-actors) in Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket,” her favorite film. Stimulated by this brief encounter, she tracked down and interviewed the film’s three main figures for “The Models of Pickpocket.”

Mr. Laymarie currently works in Caen as a genetic researcher. Marika Green, an actress, lives in Austria. Martin Lasalle, the pickpocket himself, was found in Mexico. They are three of the most iconic faces in French cinema, and “The Models of Pickpocket” immediately interests in a “where are they now?” sort of way. But “models” are not “actors,” and this is much more than a document of simple fandom (though it’s that, too).

In “Notes on the Cinematographer,” his collection of aphorisms, directives, and cine-koans, Bresson summarized his ideal of the model as, “BEING (models) instead of SEEMING (actors).” He wanted to get something of a person’s existential weight up on the screen, rather than the manipulative effects of performance. Ineffably shattering masterpieces like “Mouchette,” and “Au Hasard Balthazar” prove the uncanny efficacy of his method.

Ms. Mangolte’s subjects explain the process. For a scene in “Pickpocket” demanding nothing more complex than a quick walk up some stairs, Bresson deployed Mr. Laymarie more than 40 times. This gave options in the cutting room (an aspect of Bresson’s strategy rarely discussed), but more importantly it gradually emptied the actor of any emotion or thought that might taint his action. Bresson wanted a thing, not the performance of a thing: this man climbing these steps – and no more.

“The Models of Pickpocket” is a fascinating footnote, essential viewing for the Bresson cult. Anthology Film Archives has helped the neophyte by programming “Pickpocket” all week and honoring Ms. Mangolte with a retrospective of her work as both director and cinematographer.