GREAT SCENES
A Better Tomorrow / 英雄本色 (John Woo, 1986)

In a spirited homage to Johnny Boy’s entrance in Mean Streets, Mark Gor (Chow Yun-fat) sashays his way into a restaurant before a shootout.

With A Better Tomorrow, Woo ignited the “heroic bloodshed” genre of Hong Kong action cinema, combining operatic montage sequences, charismatic criminals as protagonists and recurring themes of redemption and chivalry.

Red Cliff (John Woo, 2009)

David Liu | 8 May 2010

Heroic bloodshed returns to form as John Woo takes on the Battle of Red Cliffs, fought in central China during the winter of 208 A.D. between warlords struggling to unify a fractured nation. Throughout most of its two-part, 280-minute running time (the watered down U.S. version loses a whopping 132 minutes of footage), Red Cliff shines as brightly as Woo’s genre-defining 1980s works, juxtaposing masterful action and spectacle with the glorious allure of China’s Three Kingdoms era.