‘Face/Off’

John Woo is known for a cinema of violent delirium so breathtaking it plays like visual poetry, and “Face/Off,” though his third film in Hollywood, is the first to expose mainstream audiences to the master at his most anarchically persuasive. It’s a film that demands that its stars play two roles, one nestled inside the other like interlocking toy dolls, a task been handled so persuasively by John Travolta (pictured) and Nicolas Cage that they’ve inspired Woo to do his best work in years (HBO Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3:35 a.m.).