Red Cliff

John Woo’s colossal five-hour epic recreates the Battle of Red Cliffs (208–209 A.D.) as a thriller of tactics and temperament, anchored by Tony Leung’s soulful performance as Zhou Yu—a “warrior-poet” general of the southern kingdom of Wu, leading an uneasy alliance against Chancellor Cao Cao’s overwhelming northern invasion. As Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) drives this campaign to unify China by force, Zhou Yu helps broker an uneasy alliance between southern ruler Sun Quan (Chang Chen) and the exiled warlord Liu Bei, whose forces are guided by master strategist Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro), sealed in a candlelit guqin duet that doubles as a test of wills. What follows is Woo at operatic scale: cavalry trapped in the Eight Trigrams formation, plague corpses floated downriver, a “borrowed arrows” gambit at dawn, and a fire-ship assault that sets the Yangtze ablaze. Film at Lincoln Center is pleased to present this exceptionally rare 35mm screening of Red Cliff in its complete two-part version, with a 35-minute intermission on April 30 and 45-minute intermission on May 3.