Metacritic reviews

The spectacular battle scenes are the engorged heart of the delirious adventure. But Woo also gets maximum romantic value from Tony Leung as a war hero married to Chiling Lin as the tea-pouring beauty.

Camp, over-the-top and entirely unbelievable: in short, the best thing John Woo has made in years.

Balances character, grit, spectacle and visceral action in a meaty, dramatically satisfying pie that delivers on the hype and will surprise many who felt the Hong Kong helmer progressively lost his mojo during his long years stateside.

Red Cliff exudes a physical grandiosity that few movies of the past 20 years have attempted--no matter that Woo, even at his best, is still more at ease with down-and-dirty action than epic pageantry.

It's a movie on the Hollywood scale that has so much of the Asian spirit. It has drawn the Asian audience back to the movie theater.

A scrumptious war movie.

Any war picture in which the heroine stalls the villain with a quiet, painstaking tea ceremony until the wind shifts direction and the good guys can firebomb the bad guys into oblivion is too ineffably Zen not to love.

A prelude that provides the beams and columns for the narrative framework, but with a few decisive and spot-on action spectacles, it sufficiently kindles expectations for the climactic clash in Part 2.

While handsome and intelligent and perfectly easy to sit through, never really approaches the visceral tug of Mr. Woo’s Hong Kong hits.

For all his brilliance with choreography, Woo is flummoxed by the thousands of actual human extras, though there’s no denying his commitment to the finer points of battle tactics (yawn).