Welcome to Subway Cinema News. This week: big budget, wide releases that may or may not technically be Asian!

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First off, hie thee thither to see John Woo’s RED CLIFF. It’s playing at the Landmark Sunshine and at the Beekman (2nd Avenue between 66th and 67th) and you need to see it on the big screen to follow some of this lightning fast editing. Taking the two RED CLIFF movies and compressing them into one 2 hours and 40 minute film actually makes for a better movie, and despite the annoying white guy doing a voice-over at the beginning (he has about three sentences and all of them are reductive, useless and borderline crass) this is a major return to form for John Woo and one of the better movies of the year. Takeshi Kaneshiro gives an unexpectedly nuanced performance and some of the sequences and setpieces are as hard to get out of your head as a pitch perfect pop song’s hook. For me, the lead-up to the final battle that cuts between a woman performing a tea ceremony as a diversionary tactic, Tony Leung waiting for the wind to change direction and Takeshi Kaneshiro waiting to see if he’s been betrayed or if his allies still trust him is the best 15 minutes of filmmaking this year. (showtimes)

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On a decidedly lesser note, Rain, the Korean pop star with perfect abs and sometime movie star (I’M A CYBORG BUT THAT’S OKAY), appears in the muddled and muddy NINJA ASSASSIN (as opposed to NINJA DUCK HERDER). That’s playing all over town. You’ve seen the posters.

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Finally, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov has made a movie about the last days of Japan’s wartime emperor, Emperor Hirohito, and arthouse people lurve this movie. (more info and showtimes)

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Bollywood pauses for no Thanksgiving and the new romantic kidnapping musical comedy DE DANA DAN is screening at the Empire 25 and at Phoenix Adlabs Big Cinemas (formerly the ImaginAsian on East 59th Street). DE DANA DAN stars Akshay Kumar and Sunil Shetty. (showtimes)

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