John Woo's Face/Off is a genuinely original piece of cinema. But originality is a more interesting thing than we usually give it credit for. The most original works are not the ones that arrive from nowhere — nothing arrives from nowhere — but the ones that cast a new light on myths and narrative tensions that have been traveling through human storytelling for centuries. That new light doesn't diminish what came before. It illuminates it.

A filmmaker's response to Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace — the Soviet epic restored by Criterion and available now in its full four-part, seven-hour form. On spectacle, chaos, Pierre Bezukhov, and why nothing in the history of cinema quite compares.