Films about the past have no power as drama unless they are about the present too, and also, in a fashion, about the future. Even in the 208 AD China depicted in John Woo's Red Cliff we have to believe, as if we were living it, that something is at stake: not just our filmgoing senses, tied to a post as the flames of historical conflagration leap and lick around us, but the destiny of a people, a nation, or simply a set of characters we warm to and identify with.

Red Cliff gets everything right - sensationally right - except this one vital pulse of engagement. The battle scenes in the truth-torn tale of a China riven by conflict, as a tyrannous prime minister tries to subdue allied armies from east and south, are to die for in every sense. Hails of arrows cross-hatching the sky; hell-bent cavalries colliding in visions of carnage; a naval fleet torched in an infernal seascape worthy of J.M.W. Turner. And bodies hurtle skyward or earthward in a thrilling, beautiful, non-stop ballet of gravity submission or defiance.