All Critics (109)
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Top Critics (23)
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Fresh (97)
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DVD (4)
The director's magnum opus.
The result is an awfully big and powerful movie, even in abbreviated form.
A formidable prelude to an epic battle with resplendent effects and action spectacles.
Flaws and all, you can't watch a frame of it without feeling that it has been generations since Hollywood tackled anything on this scale.
It's hard to know what we're missing from the extended cut, but this Red Cliff feels awfully complete to me.
It's a historical war movie with impressive sweep, strong characterizations and the kind of idiosyncratic flourishes that made Woo such an irresistible storyteller.
The art of war done John Woo style, Red Cliff is an entertaining and grandiose return to form by the master of action cinema.
... a magnificent military epic with the scale of Lord of the Rings and the grand visual majesty of the recent wave of Chinese historical epics...
After years of civil war, Prime Minister General Cao Cao attempts to unite the empire under the Han Dynasty by quashing two troublesome warlords.
It's like the most complicated game of Stratego ever. Still, if you used to while away Saturday afternoons watching martial arts epics on cable, you'll have a good time.
You may have the biggest flat-screen DLP monitor in the city, but Red Cliff will never look half as spectacular as it will on the big -- and I mean really big -- screen.
John Woo's best work has always been mysterious to me. He makes operas - we don't need to understand the words to sense their power.
It's not top-notch Woo, but it's also not Hollywood so-so Woo.
This is one of the best foreign language films of 2009. Woo demonstrates a storytelling style of swiftness and grandeur that has been compared to the samurai classics of Akira Kurosawa.
As drama Red Cliff is overwrought. As spectacle, though, John Woo's latest is the real thing, an old-fashioned cast-of-thousands collision of armies.
It reminded me of a Road Runner cartoon. The battlefield violence is essentially repetitious, but Woo -- the auteur as Wile E. Coyote -- introduces gimmicks ('the tortoise formation'), tricks and variations to keep things interesting.
As hard as it tries, Red Cliff just can't muster the heavily filtered mythmaking of the war films of Steven Spielberg and David Lean. And thank goodness for that.
Woo has re-embraced his Chinese roots with brutal commitment.
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