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Reviews Counted:92
Fresh:81
Rotten:11
Average Rating:7.1/10
Consensus: Featuring some impressively grand battlefield action, John Woo returns to Asia and returns to form in the process for this lavish and slick historical epic.
I would have given the original film at least a four-star rating; the cut version is diminished but not entirely ruined. The nuances may have been left on the cutting-room floor but the spectacle just about survives.
Top CriticRed Cliff marks his return to form with the most expensive Chinese-speaking film ever made.
Top CriticLike your chinese action? The huge battles, physics defying fight sequences, the sense of history in the making? Then you'll love Red Cliff.
Top CriticThe most beautiful Asian epic since Bernardo Bertolucci's Oscar triumph, The Last Emperor, 22 years ago.
Top CriticA handsome, vigorous, entertaining film that never becomes exhilarating.
Top CriticThe decision to release only an ‘international’ cut-down version, combining the two original films and almost halving the running time is a terrible one -- it’s akin to screening half of Lawrence of Arabia.
Top CriticWoo revels in a gritty realism that genuinely imparts both the brutality and creativity of ancient warfare.
Top CriticThe mix of real history and imagined events results in filmmaking of high quality, despite the gaps and possible confusion of the foreign story.
Top CriticWoo has a knack for the spectacular, and Red Cliff is certainly something to behold.
Top CriticJohn Woo returns to China to make a film he has been burning to make, an adaptation from the much read book, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written in about the 14th century; many years after the events depicted, but then these events are as important in
Top CriticIt'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.
A formidable prelude to an epic battle with resplendent effects and action spectacles.
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.
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.
One of the most exhilarating action movies of the year.
It’s hard to know what we’re missing from the extended cut, but this Red Cliff feels awfully complete to me.
November 19, 2009:
Critics Consensus: New Moon Wanes
This week at the movies, we've got hot teen vampires (The Twilight Saga: New Moon, starring Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson); a football family (The Blind Side, starring... More...
October 16, 2009:
John Woo Prepares to Unleash Flying Tigers 
His "Red Cliff" is finally reaching American theaters next month, but John Woo is already on to his next project, a war drama to be titled "Flying Tigers." More...
October 04, 2009:
Trailer & Poster review
More...
May 19, 2009:
Sydney Film Festival Gets Wooed
Hong Kong action maestro John Woo will appear at this year's Sydney Film Festival to present his latest epic, Red Cliff, which has its Australian premiere on June 9. The... More...
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