The Best of SIFF 2012: Week Two

I didn't see nearly as many films this week as I did last week, and the films this week were not the juggernauts that Goodbye and How to Survive a Plague were.  Still, I found one surprisingly great film, and an honorable mention whose greatness came from its subject, if not always its execution. 170 …

Red Cliff Revisited

About a year ago, I reviewed the 2 1/2 hour version of Red Cliff. Now that I have seen the original 4 hour 42 minute version (on a big screen, no less), I feel I can do justice to a film in which, as I stated in my original review, there appeared to be a masterpiece lurking underneath. That masterpiece doesn't surface in the full version (which is one film split into two parts, much like Lord of the Rings was one film split into three parts), but what does surface is a much better film that the international release.

Movie Review: Red Cliff

An artist's rendition of Zhuge Liang There is a point in John Woo's Red Cliff  when the alliance between Liu Bei (Yong You) and Sun Quan (Chen Chang) has suffered what seems to be an irreversible setback.  Their adversary, the evil Prime Minister Cao Cao (Fengyi Zhang), has sent the dead bodies of his typhoid-ridden soldiers …