empire of light movie review guardian

Empire of Light review – Olivia Colman shines in Sam Mendes’ darkening hymn to cinema

The ‘love letter to the movies’ genre is revived in this poignant, wonderfully acted drama about love, life and films

T he “love letter to the movies” is a tricky genre, teetering on maudlin industry indulgence; my own rule is that any film, on any subject, if it is any good, is already a love letter to the movies. The template tends to be melancholy and bittersweet, a ruin-porn lament for nearly empty theatres and nearly lost youth. Maybe in the future there will be films that are love letters to streaming: sad films showing people watching TV screens that are blank except for the single title card declaring that the streamer has gone broke due to unsustainable debt … before thoughtfully wondering what is on at the cinema.

But Sam Mendes , making his first solo outing as a writer as well as director, has taken the style and substance of this form and revived it with an engrossing, poignantly observed and beautifully acted drama about love, life and the fragile art of moviegoing – starring Olivia Colman and wonderfully shot by Roger Deakins. And he does it with all the more urgency now that cinema is under threat again after Covid. This film takes something from the tenderness and sadness of movies like The Smallest Show on Earth or Cinema Paradiso or The Last Picture Show – adding maybe a little bit of the lonely disquiet of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. But Mendes brings his own distinctive sense of personal drama, his adroit handling of actors and his sweet tooth for catchy jukebox slams, a style I remember from his American Beauty . Here we get invigorating blasts of Dylan’s It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) and Joni Mitchell’s You Turn Me on I’m a Radio.

A depressed cinema manager called Hilary, marvellously played by Colman, works at a (fictional) cinema called the Empire on the Margate seafront in 1981 as Britain swan-dives into recession, unemployment and widespread racism. Hilary is conscientious, with a real dedication to her job: selling tickets, checking receipts, cleaning the auditorium after the show. The people who work at the Empire are family – of sorts – with a grumpy and pompous manager, Mr Ellis (Colin Firth), dedicated projectionist Norman (Toby Jones) and assistants Neil (Tom Brooke) and Janine (Hannah Onslow). But Hilary, who lives alone, and who appears to be in treatment for some undiscussed breakdown the year before, is sliding further into unhappiness, made worse by her toxic relationship with a smugly uncaring married man who says hideously unsexy things during the act itself (“Your arse feels so good in my hands”). And Hilary has a gloomy connoisseurship of the cinema building itself, whose corridors she wanders. The Empire has had to close two of its four screens and the entire upstairs bar due to falling box office receipts: and Hilary is one of the few people who know about this secret, pigeon-infested ghostship chamber of emptiness.

But then the Empire hires a new ticket-seller: Stephen (played with emotional openness and sympathy by Micheal Ward), a young Black man who has an instant connection with Hilary: their relationship blossoms, but the nature of Hilary’s sadness rises alarmingly to the surface.

There are some wonderful set-piece scenes in Empire of Light: everyone, especially the self-important Mr Ellis, is thrilled at the news that the cinema is to get a special regional premiere of that summer’s smash-hit, Chariots of Fire, with loads of dignitaries present – but the big night is marred by a terrible scene that Hilary makes out in the foyer, once the film has begun, which is made more painfully surreal and hilarious by the unmistakable sounds of Vangelis’s electronic theme tune in the background as the shouting commences. There are some other films of the era getting shown, but perhaps it is appropriate that the Empire is showing Being There, starring Peter Sellers, one of his last films and his return to form. (I found myself remembering Sellers’ grim recollection that most of his 70s movies were so unpopular, cinemas would put them on if they needed the auditorium to be empty so they could vacuum-clean it.)

Empire of Light is a sweet, heartfelt, humane movie, which doesn’t shy away from the brutality and the racism that was happening in the streets outside the cinema: the Empire is showing Stir Crazy starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, directed by Sidney Poitier – a message of diversity, if 1981 Britain cared to listen. It’s clearly a labour of love for Sam Mendes: love requited.

• Toronto film festival 2022
• Olivia Colman
• Toronto film festival
• Drama films
• Period and historical films

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Empire of Light

“Empire of Light” is a grandiose title for Sam Mendes’ intimate new character drama, which starts out a bit dim and unfocused and becomes sharper and more illuminating as it unreels.

The story is set in the fall and winter of 1980-81 in the seaside town of Margate, Kent, around a palatial two-screen Art Deco theater that shows films that were new back then (including “ Raging Bull ,” “ Stir Crazy ,” and “9 to 5”) and that fed the imagination of young Mendes, who based parts of the script on his youth. The result keeps seeming as if it’s about to fully commit being another “Behold The Magic of the Movies” movies (we get a couple of those a year, at least; film awards voters like them) as well as a quasi-memoir that puts a new frame around an established director’s work (there have been several of those recently as well; sometimes they’re the same movie). And in the first third of “Empire of Light,” there are many warning signs that the film is going to amount to nothing more than an Oscar campaign for itself. There’s a projectionist played by Toby Jones who demonstrates how a projector works and talks about the persistence of vision and how light can shut out darkness. Various characters keep urging the heroine, the lonely, workaholic duty manager Hilary Small ( Olivia Colman ), to go sit in an auditorium once in a while, and let cinema transport her away from her miseries (one guess as to whether she takes their suggestion). 

Mendes and his cinematographer Roger Deakins use the panoramic screen shape to emphasize how ordinary lives unfold within a landscape of history that the tiny figures in its foreground can’t fully comprehend. The problem is that, at first, all the characters are written Small, not just Hilary: figurines of “ordinary people” that would seem condescending if the performers didn’t give them life through body language and intonation, and if Mendes and Deakins didn’t frame and light them with such care. 

We see sad-eyed Hilary rallying herself to banter with the staff, having a furtive and degrading sexual encounter with her married boss Mr. Ellis ( Colin Firth ), eating alone and walking alone and sitting in her apartment alone, and sliding down into a tub and staying underwater (the gestural expression of a suicide wish). Her newest trainee, an affable and handsome young Black man named Stephen ( Micheal Ward ), connects with her so strongly that we know a rejuvenating (though inappropriate) workplace affair is right around the corner. Ward brings an early-1960s Sidney Poitier energy to the role: the character is engaging and witty and game for anything, but wise about how brutally post-Thatcher England treats people like him. 

But he remains an abstraction for too long, to the point where it looks like the film is setting him up as more of a plot device (or sacrificial lamb) than a man. The movie trembles with intimations of impending doom for Stephen, and the dialogue mentions then-recent racial incidents. But Mendes presents his anger, fear and distress with the same dissociated stare that freezes Hillary in her tracks when she sees skinheads tormenting Stephen on a sidewalk. Here, as in other parts of the film, the storytelling is jumbled. And it seems less easygoing (in the manner of a “hangout” movie) than inclined to digress for rhetorical purposes. You can’t tell if a scene seems perfunctory or underwritten or flat because the movie doesn’t want to give you too much too early, or if it’s one of those films that’s can’t decide what to do with itself.

Eventually, though, “Empire of Light” finds its groove and stays in it. The positive transformation is so sudden and surefooted that it might make you wonder why the film didn’t lay all its significant narrative and characterization cards on the table in the first few minutes and jump to what’s interesting: the tension between the social obligation to help people who are troubled or otherwise in need, versus the collateral damage that tends to happen when the helpers don’t realize that their own compulsions are in the mix, too.

Slivers of biographical detail are offered in the first few scenes, but don’t get explored with sensitivity and in detail until (too much) later. Hilary, for instance, is on Lithium and had to go on medical leave from work a year earlier; absent an immediate, layered presentation of these factors, a lot of the early scenes read as a compendium of Sad Single Lady movie cliches. Stephen, likewise, is not the bright but opaque Nice Outsider Who’s Too Good for This World that the film lets us think he is. The most important person in his life is his mother, a workaholic single parent who has been a nurse for decades and taught her son that he has a moral imperative to heal wounded creatures (such as the pigeon with a broken wing that he tends in an early scene with Hilary). You don’t need a therapist to figure out how these two ended up together, much less know that their affair can’t last—and shouldn’t, considering the forces roiling in both of their heads. (Between Stephen and Hilary’s on-site trysts and Ellis’ exploitation of Hilary, this theater is an employment lawyer’s gold mine.) 

Mendes has said that Hilary is based partly on his own mother, so it’s not surprising that “Empire of Light” is at its best when it’s simply observing her behavior (and Colman’s acting). The filmmaking subtly shifts points of view, depending on whether Hilary is in a scene by herself or with others. Sometimes we’re over her shoulder, or in her face, experiencing what she feels, and rooting for her to impose a narrative on her life that will reclaim her dignity and solve her problems, by turning her into the hero of one of the films she’s heard other people describe but hasn’t seen for herself. Other times we’re more in the headspace of Stephen or one of the other theater employees (including Tom Brooke’s gabby, nosy Neil, who figures out what’s going on with Stephen and Hilary). We understand how big a mess her life is, and that most of the other characters aren’t models of peace and stability, either.

Colman inhabits Hilary with her customary fullness and impeccable judgment, always putting her energy into conveying the character’s churning, contradictory feelings rather than trotting out the virtuoso tricks and mannerisms that too often signify Great Screen Acting: English Division. When Hilary is at her lowest, with tears in her eyes and lipstick on her teeth, the sight pierces as deeply as seeing someone you know crater in front of you.  

Ward can’t match her because the material isn’t on the same level, but he’s still remarkable. His greatest achievement is convincing you that the character has his own inner life that’s as complicated as Hilary’s, even though there’s little in the script to support such a claim. The last 15 minutes nearly undo all the good the film’s second half has done: it feels as if Mendes is using a public calamity to forcibly merge the character study, historical/political epic, and Magic of Cinema elements that were on parallel tracks until that point. (Maybe the problem is that each of those tracks needed its own film.) Fortunately the concluding scenes pull the movie back from that particular brink, settling on a “life goes on” sort of ending.

“Empire of Light” never entirely coheres, but it’s worth seeing for the power of Colman’s lead performance and the expertly judged backup acting (by Firth especially; Ellis is a minor-league scumbag with delusions of respectability, and the actor presents him without editorial comment, which makes his actions feel more real). 

The true star of the film, though, is Roger Deakins, who has steadily become the closest thing to an heir to Gordon Willis that 21st-century cinema has allowed. Like Willis, who is best known for shooting the “Godfather” films and several classic paranoid thrillers, Deakins loves silhouettes, long shadows, and high-contrast lighting. He isn’t afraid to try to create an iconic, overwhelmingly potent image, but here—working in subtler key than he’s usually asked to play in—he seems to let the natural world guide his decisions. The film’s look errs on the side of simplicity, highlighting beauty that’s already present rather than superimposing it with technique and technology. 

There isn’t a dull or purely functional composition in the film, nor is there one that tries so hard to be weighty that it crushes Mendes’ wilting-flower characters. Deakins lets door frames and window frames, support struts, roof eaves, stairwell railings, and the lines of sidewalks and streets guide our eyes and create frames within frames. The movie even attempts some multi-panel effects, like a sequence of thematically similar paintings hanging on the wall of a gallery, and smuggles little grace notes into every scene and lets us find them on our own, seemingly not worried about whether we might miss them. Notice, for instance, how he and Mendes will put a reflective surface somewhere in the frame that lets us see the faces of characters placed in the foreground with their backs to the camera. You might not notice the other character’s reflection right away because they aren’t visible at every moment, only sometimes—as a real person would be.

Now playing in theaters.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

• Olivia Colman as Hilary
• Micheal Ward as Stephen
• Toby Jones as Norman
• Colin Firth as Mr. Ellis
• Tom Brooke as Neil
• Tanya Moodie as Delia
• Hannah Onslow as Janine
• Atticus Ross
• Trent Reznor

Cinematographer

• Roger Deakins

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‘Empire of Light’ Review: Do Yourself a Favor and See Sam Mendes’ Ode to Movies on the Big Screen

What better definition of 'movie magic' can one find than the sight of Olivia Colman and Micheal Ward's faces, reflecting their feelings for one another?

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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In the era when content is king, Sam Mendes still believes in moving pictures. “ Empire of Light ” is the proof. While the world was in lockdown these past couple years, Mendes let his imagination run to his happy place: a grand old English movie palace he dubbed the Empire Cinema. Thousands pass through its art deco doors seeking escapism, but Mendes is more interested in the employees — the projectionist, the ticket takers, the box office attendant and so forth — whose stories, he senses, are every bit as interesting as the ones they show. And so he put them up on-screen where they belong.

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The pandemic compelled so many of us to look in the mirror and pose existential questions about what we were doing and why. Mendes clearly had a lot on his mind, too, from race relations to mental health, and in the Empire, he found a container to explore them all. Too many issues in too neat a space, some might argue, but better that than the opposite. “Empire of Light” is what I think of as a “snow globe movie,” the sort where everything looks perfect, to the point of artificiality: The camera doesn’t wobble; the light is just right. If you were to walk the empty aisles, your shoes wouldn’t stick to the floor. On the soundtrack, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross supply a lovely music-box score. But even within that aesthetic, there’s room for reality — and the deeper you get into Mendes’ story, the tougher and more unpredictable it gets.

Meanwhile, the too-tidy vibe results in part from Mendes’ ongoing collaboration with DP Roger Deakins, who’s a master to be sure, but no longer someone who works on the intimate scale this project seems to want. The duo shoot in hi-def digital widescreen, which feels like the right fit during scenes where “Empire of Light” aims to emphasize the sheer grandeur of the cinema’s design — as in the magical scene where Hilary first takes Stephen upstairs to see the empty ballroom and unused screens — but feels less intimate a few scenes later, when they share New Year’s Eve on the roof and Hilary boldly steals a kiss.

The budding romance between them is surprising for any number of reasons: the age difference, the racial attitudes suggested in the town around them, the fact that Stephen loves movies, whereas Hilary’s never bothered to watch one in all the years she’s worked at the Empire (no prizes for predicting that will change before the end credits). Hilary favors poetry to film and has no friends to speak of, whereas Stephen still lives with his mom and seems relatively naive on certain subjects. “No one’s going to give you the life you want,” she tells him. “You have to go out and get it.” In other areas, he has to educate her (and a few of us), as in a valuable walk-and-talk session following a run-in with a racist customer.

Hilary doesn’t seem to have any hangups about dating a Black man, but Stephen knows the dangers, removing his arm from around Hilary’s shoulder when a white man boards the bus. Readers probably needn’t be reminded that such issues have hardly gone away, though they might not recall how tensions boiled up in 1981 England (obviously the reason Mendes chose to set the film then), with urban race riots in some cities and National Front mobs in others. “Empire of Light” climaxes early as that situation gets out of hand, trapping everyone we care about inside the lobby.

Reviewed at Telluride Film Festival, Sept. 3, 2022. Also in Toronto Film Festival. Running time: 119 MIN.

• Production: (U.K.-U.S.) A Searchlight Pictures presentation. Producers: Pippa Harris, Sam Mendes. Executive producers: Michael Lerman, Julie Pastor.
• Crew: Director, writer: Sam Mendes. Camera: Roger Deakins. Editor: Lee Smith. Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross.
• With: Olivia Colman, Micheal Ward, Tom Brooke, Tanya Moodie, Hannah Onslow, Crystal Clarke, Toby Jones, Colin Firth

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Empire of Light film review — Olivia Colman ushers in melancholy ode to cinema

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Movie review: 'empire of light'.

Bob Mondello

"Empire of Light" is director Sam Mendes' tribute to cinema. Actress Olivia Colman plays a slowly unraveling employee at Britain's Empire Theater in the 1980s.

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Empire of Light review: Olivia Colman shines in Sam Mendes' 1980s ode to cinema

The Oscar winner stars alongside newcomer Micheal Ward in the 1917 director's sweetly observed drama.

For nearly as long as there have been movies, there have been love letters to the art of it on screen, from Singin' in the Rain and Cinema Paradiso to La La Land . Sam Mendes' Empire of Light , which premiered yesterday at the Telluride Film Festival, is one of those mash notes: a tender, meandering ode to cinema that also plays as an unlikely romance, a misty snapshot of a bygone era, and an often-incandescent character study. That's in part because Mendes wrote it specifically with his star Olivia Colman — an actress who seems incapable of giving a clumsy or conventional performance — in mind. She's Hilary Small, a woman who works at a seaside cineplex on the south coast of England at the turn of the early 1980s. It's the age of The Blues Brothers and All That Jazz and Sunday matinees, when going to see a film was still a social occasion (albeit one accessible to anyone with £1.50 for a ticket; seniors are 75 pence.)

The grand old Empire, nestled so close to the waterfront that sand and seabirds nearly come up to the front doors, is an only slightly decrepit temple of plush swirly carpets, brass fittings, and attendants in crisp polyester uniforms. Hilary is considerably older than most of her coworkers — aside from a persnickety but kind projectionist played by the great Toby Jones — though she seems just right for the priggish manager, Mr. Ellis ( Colin Firth ), a man who likes the way she pre-warms his office slippers in the morning and submits to being occasionally bent over his desk for sex. When she's not selling concessions or sweeping up spilled popcorn in the aisles at work, she drinks wine in the bathtub and eats her Christmas dinners for one, waiting for the moments when Mr. Ellis will deign to shine his light her way.

The arrival of a new hire named Stephen ( Lovers Rock 's Micheal Ward) hardly seems like the thing to change that; he's too young and brash and handsome to even register some middle-aged lady. But he's also Black in a time and a place where just walking down the street can turn into a gauntlet of spittle-flecked cruelty and physical abuse, and he senses something kindred in Hilary. Soon they become improbable friends and then lovers, though their sexual connection feels more like a manifestation of their mutual loneliness than anything remotely sustainable in the real world.

And it isn't sustainable, of course, particularly when Hilary's deeper issues begin to surface (there's a reason she's on lithium, even though she hates the way it numbs her), and Stephen starts making plans for a life beyond the ticket booth. That, and the rising racial and economic tensions of Thatcher England, bode several darker turns in Mendes' script, though his narrative often plays less like a conventional drama than a memory palace, its rhythms slowed to match the tempos of this sleepy town. In that way, Empire can seem like a minor work for the director of two Bond movies, American Beauty , and one of the most ambitious war films in recent history .

But Colman, her eyes darting between hope and devastation, is so lit-up and specific (and funny , a quality that doesn't seem to get mentioned enough) that she lifts nearly every scene. And the 24-year-old relative newcomer Ward, who looks a little like a young Sidney Poitier, is remarkably warm and grounded in a part that could easily have been swallowed by the Oscar winner playing across from him. The legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins — who last won an Oscar for Mendes' 1917 — gives their beach trips and late-night bus rides a suffused glow, and even in a movie as modest as Empire , Mendes fills out the corners of his story with carefully observed details and eccentric characters, weaving them into a sort of sweetly self-contained whole. We can't live our lives sitting in the dark, he seems to say, but movies can still save us, at least a little bit. Grade: B+

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Empire of Light movie review: you’ll fall for Olivia Colman and Micheal Ward in Sam Mendes’ ode to cinema

Cinema is dying. In a post-pandemic world, streaming reigns supreme and fewer and fewer people feel inclined to put “bums in seats” when a smorgasbord of content is available right at home on a multitude of platforms. In early September Cineworld , the world’s second-largest chain of movie theatres filed for bankruptcy and now its fate hangs precariously in the balance. To dedicated filmmakers and movie-goers, this presents an ever-looming existential threat of losing one of the last communal spaces we can go to appreciate the art form.

Sam Mendes is the latest in a long line of auteurs that include Kenneth Branagh (Belfast) , Alejandro G Iñárritu (Bardo) and Steven Spielberg (The Fabelmans) doing everything in their power to jumpstart a medium that is on the point of flatlining.

Mendes’ new film Empire of Light is his loving ode to cinema set in a tumultuous 1980s Britain, in a fictional movie theatre called the Empire that overlooks the seaside town of Margate. This is Mendes’ first time writing a screenplay solo and while this isn’t a semi-autobiographical tale of his youth like Belfast, it is drawn from the same nostalgic vein that celebrates the unmatched power of the cinematic experience.

The first character he introduces us to is the Empire cinema itself. Mendes gently guides us around the theatre, saturated in red velvet and brass. Shots of old film reels are lovingly lit by Roger Deakins and accompanied by the wistfully romantic score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. We then meet deputy manager Hilary (Olivia Colman) and the other workers; the ticket takers Neil (Tom Brooke) and Janine (Hannah Onslow) as well as the venue’s projectionist (Toby Jones).

Hilary is a solemnly sad individual. She takes lithium for an unspecified mental condition and is living a numb day-to-day existence. Her sleazy boss Donald Ellis (Colin Firth) takes advantage of her, trading sexual favours in his office for boxes of Milk Tray. It is only after Hilary experiences the kindness and affection of the newest Empire staff member Stephen (Micheal Ward) that she begins to feel alive again.

Stephen is facing his own adversities too. As a young Black man living in Thatcher-era Britain with the National Front on the rise, Stephen is subjected to all manner of racial abuse both at work and on the street. Going to university to study architecture would be his salvation but for now, he currently finds much-needed escapism in watching movies.

Hilary and Steven seem like a mismatched pair but somehow it works. Despite the noticeable age gap, Colman and Ward are electric together. Colman’s versatile range of emotion is on full display and Ward is an irresistibly charming screen presence. Try not to fall in love with them.

The technical elements of this film are outstanding. Mark Tildesley beautifully punctuates the cinema-is-dying theme, particularly when our two lost souls explore the upper level of the Empire, where two disused screening rooms and the grand ballroom now belong to the pigeons.

A slew of technical nominations and a fourth acting nod for Academy-favourite Colman seem inevitable. Expect the clip of Hilary paraphrasing Shakespeare while Vangelis’ iconic theme from Chariots of Fire swells in the background to be her Oscar-clip next year.

Where Mendes struggles is with his slightly uneven script. It’s admirable he wants to comment on pertinent topics like racism and mental health but they don’t exactly inform or compliment each other when mixed together here.

It also doesn’t help that the two Black characters other than Stephen - his mum Delia (Tanya Moodie) and Ruby (Crystal Clarke) - are introduced in the final act and feel like an afterthought.

Empire of Light is a touching yarn that will strike a chord with audiences and sentimental voters of the Academy. It’s not saying anything new but it’s a heartwarming reminder of the joy, comfort and necessity of the big screen experience.

Empire of Light premiered at the Telluride film festival and will be released in UK cinemas on January 13

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• Cast & crew
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Empire of Light

A drama about the power of human connection during turbulent times, set in an English coastal town in the early 1980s. A drama about the power of human connection during turbulent times, set in an English coastal town in the early 1980s. A drama about the power of human connection during turbulent times, set in an English coastal town in the early 1980s.

• Olivia Colman
• Micheal Ward
• Colin Firth
• 173 User reviews
• 212 Critic reviews
• 54 Metascore
• 3 wins & 39 nominations total

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• Donald Ellis

• Rosemary Bates

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• Trivia The actual Dreamland cinema in Margate (which stood in for the Empire cinema in this film) was opened in 1923. It changed hands several times during its lifetime and finally closed for good in 2007. It still stands, although empty, because it is a listed building and so cannot be demolished without parliamentary approval. The block of flats where Steven lives with his mother is not an optical effect: it is really is that close to the building (with Margate railway station being just 100 yards up the road).
• Goofs During a scene that takes place in 1981, Janine mentions she heard about a song from SPIN magazine. Spin magazine was not founded until 1985.

Stephen : Amazin'.

Norman : It is amazing. Because it's just static frames, with darkness in between. But there's a little flaw in your optic nerve so that if I run the film at 24 frames per second you don't see the darkness.

Stephen : Wow.

Norman : It's called the Phi Phenomenon. Viewing static images rapidly in succession crates an illusion of motion. Illusion of life.

• Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: This Movie was Shockingly Terrible - Best and Worst of TIFF 2022 (2022)
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• December 9, 2022 (United States)
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Empire Of Light Review: Sam Mendes Challenges Convention With A Unique Love Story [TIFF]

Set in a past-its-prime movie theater — a holdover from a long-gone era — "Empire of Light" is as much a celebration of the old as it is a treatise on embracing the future. The film is set in the early 1980s and represents a transitionary period for the theater industry specifically and British society as a whole. To us viewers in 2022, the Empire Cinema feels impossibly nostalgic; the days of film projectors and red velvet curtains are long gone. But "Empire of Light" looks back even further, lovingly lingering on glamor shots and posters from Old Hollywood. For the Empire movie house, its best days are firmly behind her.

And that's okay.

Written and directed by Sam Mendes, "Empire of Light" is an unconventional romance primarily concerned with questioning conventions. The film centers on Hillary (Olivia Colman), a sad, lonely woman working in the Empire cinema in an English seaside town. Her existence (like the theater) has become dull and largely empty over the years. However, her humdrum life is unexpectedly shaken up when the young and handsome Stephen (Micheal Wardis) is hired on. Despite being from vastly different backgrounds, there's an undeniable spark between them. As the two grow closer, he helps her see the world around her in a new light — for a time. 

Questioning social conventions

"Empire of Light" is a challenge to taboos — this much is obvious from the premise. Its central relationship is between Hillary, a white middle-aged woman stuck in a rut, and Stephen, a Black young man with his whole life ahead of him. Their sexual relationship is one that we never see represented in media: not only is it interracial, but also the woman is significantly older than the man. There are notes that this is scandalous or even potentially embarrassing, yet the film takes great care to present their intimate moments as sensual, sweet, and sincere (rather than being awkward or played for laughs).

In "Empire of Light," Mendes is also subtly deconstructing other, more nuanced, social rules and expectations. The healthy (at least initially) relationship between Hillary and Stephen is juxtaposed with the very unhealthy, yet more socially acceptable, relationship between Hillary and her much older, married, boss, Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth). This contrast highlights the hypocrisy in a society that more readily approves of an older man exploiting his female employee for sexual gratification than an older woman having a consensual relationship with a younger man. There's a stigma that comes with being an older woman, especially if one doesn't fit into very specific beauty standards. And by the end of the second act, it's clear Mendes is also trying to make a statement about the stigma women face due to mental illness.

Strong performances from Colman and Wardis

Colman gives an unforgettable performance as Hillary — possibly a career-best, and that's saying something. This is a woman who is firmly middle-aged. There's no vaseline on the lens here: Mendes finds a balance that accentuates the markers of her age while still flattering her best assets. Her beauty is the ray of sunshine that lights up her whole face when she's happy, the depth of the shadows flittering behind her eyes when she reads poetry. It's so rare for a woman, especially of this age demographic, to be presented as not only beautiful but also desirable — not despite her flaws, but because of the depth of her humanity. Hillary might not be glamorous, but she is charming, relatable, and kind.

Of course, this wouldn't be much of a romance without some serious chemistry — of which there is plenty. Stephen is wise beyond his years, making him a fitting match for Hillary — they connect as equals, rather than it ever coming across like she's using authority over him or grooming him in any way. Wardis is very attractive on screen, but his performance is what really makes "Empire of Light" something special. His kindness and his loyalty endear him to the audience and make his actions in the last act believable.

There is not a traditional happy ending in "Empire of Light," and the plot does languish, which may hurt the film's reception.  This is not a romance in the sense of two people falling in love and riding off into the sunset together — instead, it ends on a cautiously optimistic note, showing two human beings who have grown from their experiences and have learned to embrace fresh starts. Starting over again is hard, and like with the Empire theater, the future may not present the glories of the past — but going forward, and accepting life for what it is and what it could be, is the best course of action.  

/Film Rating: 8 out of 10

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In Sam Mendes’ ‘Empire of Light’, a Faded Cinema Still Holds Romance

Please try again

The top floor of the Empire Cinema, as seen in the opening moments of Empire of Light , is a wasteland. Gilt mirrors in the hallway reflect nothing but their own worn-out, tarnished edges, while wayward pigeons flutter around the empty Art Deco lounge. Alighting on booths and tables and window sills, the birds ignore the ocean view and the distant blue horizon. Downstairs, the main theater is frayed around the edges, but still open to the public. The ruby red curtain and matching seats shimmer with a faded glamor when the lights come up.

On the marquee out front, the rotating names of movies — Raging Bull , Chariots of Fire , Being There — situate Sam Mendes’ new film around 1980. Empire of Light isn’t just an elegy to one English movie theater — it’s a plaintive farewell to a specific age of cinema. And Hilary (played by Olivia Colman), the Empire Cinema’s “duty manager,” embodies the spirit of the building’s interior decay.

Hilary is a poetry-loving, solitary soul who’s weighed down by the complications of a messy inner life. Early in the film, when she visits a doctor’s office, we find out she’s not just suffering from middle-aged malaise. The doctor asks her how she’s responding to a prescription for lithium. She pauses and quietly responds that she’s fine, but numb. She’ll get used to feeling that way, he says.

Mendes doesn’t use flashbacks or voiceovers in Empire of Light to explicate Hilary’s troubled history. Instead, the film progresses organically, focused on her present state: She appears to be satisfied with her job. It’s low pressure. She turns on lights, serves candy at the concession stand, sells tickets and sweeps up popcorn. Her coworkers, a collection of amiable misfits who accept each other, aren’t there for Mendes to produce petty, extraneous squabbles. They happily go about their business.

A shift in the status quo comes with the introduction of Stephen (Micheal Ward), a new employee at the Empire. An aspiring architect waiting for a place to open at a university, he’s living with his mother in the meantime. On his first day, Hilary tours him through the cinema’s abandoned top floor, where he finds a pigeon with a broken wing. With some ingenuity, Stephen creates a makeshift sling for the bird. It’s not lost on either of them that Hilary’s wings are also in need of mending.

Their unlikely friendship is juxtaposed through musical choices. Stephen loves ska music in general and The Beat in particular. At home after their first kiss, Hilary plays Joni Mitchell’s “You Turn Me On I’m a Radio.” She’s from another generation, taking ballroom dance lessons to alleviate her sense of isolation. At the same time, she’s entangled in a furtive office affair with another lost soul: Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth), the Empire Cinema’s married manager.

Roger Deakins’ cinematography tempers what must sound like a melodramatic plot. At the film’s start, the camera coldly assesses each room in the Empire Cinema — just as Stanley Kubrick’s lens examined the hotel in The Shining . And while the theater is a major presence in Empire of Light , it isn’t an antagonistic one. It’s a gathering place, where the characters bump into each other with fraught or tender emotions, warming the empty spaces.

Olivia Colman does have the Jack Nicholson role here, but not as a snowbound, ax-wielding writer. Mendes’ script broadly references Nicholson’s body of work from the 1970s. In Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens , Nicholson’s antiheroes either couldn’t conform to society’s rules or actively rebelled against them.

Similarly, outside of the Empire Cinema’s beautiful walls, Hilary’s mental illness underlines her inability to fit in. But here the opposition is internal; she’s fighting against her own troubled mind to find a way to connect. As her friendship with Stephen begins to change, she sees him subjected to racist attacks, both verbal and physical. When it’s most emotionally persuasive, Empire of Light acts as a companion piece to Small Axe , Steve McQueen’s anthology about West Indian immigrants in England.

But this film is told from Hilary’s point of view, not Stephen’s, as it explores the dawning of her consciousness to a wider, often harsher world. At the height of one of her manic episodes, she recites a few lines from W.H. Auden’s poem “Death’s Echo.” The last stanza ends with an exhortation, “Dance, dance, dance till you drop.” Empire of Light studies a woman who’s desperately trying to shake off her feeling of numbness. As the cinema’s exhausted muse and its battered figurehead, she seeks the emotional solace promised in so many films.

‘Empire of Light’ opens in Bay Area theaters on Friday, Dec. 7.

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Empire of Light Reviews

It pays tribute to cinema, not as an assertion of tradition in a wildly evolving industry, but rather an opportunity to reminisce and even remember why we watch, write about, and make movies in the first place.

Full Review | Jul 12, 2024

Olivia Colman’s charisma is undone by plastic narration and inconsistent tones.

Full Review | Jun 10, 2024

Stephen is so perfect instead of ordinary like his fellow employees, which is its own type of stereotype. We need to be perfect to be human.

Full Review | Jun 7, 2024

I did not enjoy it, too navel gaze-y, too long, too depressing

Full Review | Apr 24, 2024

Sees Mendes return back to a time when his movies actually said something. If you go into this film expecting this to be like his work on the James Bond franchise you will be disappointed - this is a love letter to cinema from Mendes himself.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 18, 2023

Empire of Light’s lack of focus and glaringly obvious thematic overtures had me wondering if we’d be better off watching these characters sit through a screening of An American Werewolf in London or Time Bandits instead.

Full Review | Oct 16, 2023

Although there isn't a true character development, the performances are excellent, and the story leaves us thinking about discrimination, racial violence, and the misogynistic attitudes that prevail in the environment. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: B | Aug 10, 2023

Colman plays each moment with an honesty that is so brilliant it does often eclipse the work of those around her.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Aug 9, 2023

Mendes offers a melodrama that on the surface looks beautiful with Deakins's visual craftsmanship, but whose love story stumbles into platitudes that lacks emotion and is populated by bland characters. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Aug 6, 2023

As far as 2022 movies in which a Black character exists mainly to reflect the journey of the white protagonist go, it’s not as bad as Armageddon Time. But it’s close.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2023

Some have called out the screenplay as the singular weak spot in this barrage of masterclass craftsmanship, but I’d argue that the loose threads contribute to the melancholy vignette quality of the film.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 29, 2023

As an exploration of a May-December romance, an unstable psyche, racism, or movie magic, Empire of Light sputters along the same well-worn road that far better films have traveled before.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Empire of Light works best as a love letter to the art of filmmaking and the theater experience.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jul 25, 2023

At its heart, "Empire of Light" doesn't know what it wants to be, often relying on its audience to transport themselves into an empty movie theater, signifying nothing.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

I fell completely and utterly in love with Empire of Light. A soothing, beautiful, & touching film that Sam Mendes put his heart & soul into. A film that showcases how important cinema is in connecting each & every one of us no matter who we are!

Empire of Light is a lovely, personal film illuminating tiny splices of life. Mendes brings magic to the employees of the Empire, but unfortunately, his mixture of themes never fits into one solid story.

Empire of Light is lost in its own grandness. The film wants to be a meaningful celebration of the almost religious experience it is to go to the movies, but seems to believe that isn’t enough to sustain a two hour movie.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

Empire Of Light may not appear sexy at first glance, but it’s a must-see for anyone who likes a good old love story with an unconventional twist as it provides one of the more realistic depictions of true love that we’ve seen in a long time.

Full Review | Jul 19, 2023

Disjointed and empty-handed...

Full Review | Original Score: D | Jul 19, 2023

Surprisingly, it is the actors who shine in this intimate and poignant film, taking center stage and breathing life into the story, a departure from the directorial prowess of Sam Mendes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 16, 2023

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Review: Lonely souls at the cinema in ‘Empire of Light’

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Micheal Ward and Olivia Colman, right, in a scene from “Empire of Light.” (Searchlight Pictures via AP)

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Olivia Colman in a scene from “Empire of Light.” (Searchlight Pictures via AP)

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Olivia Colman and Micheal Ward, right, in a scene from “Empire of Light.” (Searchlight Pictures via AP)

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Toby Jones, left, and Olivia Colman in a scene from “Empire of Light.” (Searchlight Pictures via AP)

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Micheal Ward and Olivia Colman in a scene from “Empire of Light.” (Searchlight Pictures via AP)

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Colin Firth, left, and Olivia Colman in a scene from “Empire of Light.” (Searchlight Pictures via AP)

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Olivia Colman plays the manager of a movie theater in Sam Mendes’ new film “ Empire of Light .” It’s a cinema palace in a small town on England’s south coast that is showing its age. The once grand establishment used to play films on multiple screens on multiple floors. The top floor even had a large ballroom area, a piano, a stately bar and booth-style seating next to large windows looking out onto the sea. Going to the movies here, you imagine, must have been an occasion worth dressing up for. But now it’s just gathering dust and providing shelter to the local pigeons.

This is not a movie about people watching movies, however. Not literally at least. There is a wistful monologue about how projection works, from Toby Jones, and another about how the movies can be an escape and, of course, it’s all building to something. But movies are mostly just the glamorous backdrop to a dreary workplace. “Empire of Light” is instead about a few people who make the movie theaters run, who take the tickets and sweep the popcorn and other disgusting items people leave on the floors and seats.

Colman’s character, Hilary, doesn’t even watch the movies herself. Those, she explains with all the passion of a customer service representative working an overnight shift, are for the patrons. It’s unclear if she’s always been this way, or if it’s the lithium the doctor has prescribed her to take to regulate her moods, but her life is going through the motions, whether it’s setting up the sweets stand or going into the back room with her lecherous, married boss (played, upsettingly well, by Colin Firth).

There is an overwhelming melancholy to the whole endeavor, which is handsomely shot by Roger Deakins and feels like a farewell to something. Mendes, who also wrote the script, was inspired by a pivotal era in his own life. “Empire of Light” is set in the early days of Margaret Thatcher’s run as Prime Minister, when the culture in the country seemed to be fracturing in some ways, with increased violence and racism juxtaposed with some extraordinary art and music. He was a teenager at the time.

But this isn’t “The Fabelmans” or “Armageddon Time.” Mendes has not made his teenage self the protagonist, but instead a woman in middle age who is suffering from mental health issues, and a magnetic younger Black man, Stephen (an excellent showcase for Michael Ward), who far too smart and vibrant for this provincial town. Hilary and Stephen become friends, then lovers, but, you know, it’s complicated and the film is a bit meandering in getting where it’s going.

You have to respect Mendes and all of these masters of their craft, from Deakins to composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, for banding together for “Empire of Light,” which, even for the guy who made “Skyfall,” seems like an improbable film to get made: Original, quiet, elegant. But “Empire of Light” is also easy to admire but difficult to love. Though Colman is always wonderful, Hilary still feels like a bit of an enigma. I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to want for her aside from better mental health care, which is probably not going to come in the form of stepping in the cinema, though it’s a romantic thought.

“Empire of Light” may be a love letter to the movies, but it’s a sad one in which one of the parties, the local, independent movie theater, is fading away and possibly already gone.

“Empire of Light,” a Searchlight Pictures release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “sexual content, language and brief violence.” Running time: 119 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

MPA definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.

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‘empire of light’ review: olivia colman shines in sam mendes’ uneven romantic drama.

The filmmaker’s follow-up to ‘1917’ had its world premiere at Telluride and explores the unlikely bond between two employees of a movie theater.

By Sheri Linden

Sheri Linden

Senior Copy Editor/Film Critic

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'nickel boys' trailer stars daveed diggs, aunjanue ellis-taylor in adaptation of pulitzer-winning novel, 'better man' review: 'greatest showman' director tackles robbie williams biopic, with a simian twist and mixed results, empire of light.

Colman’s Hilary, who often wears a stricken expression, is apparently recovering from a period of intense mental exhaustion, and being treated with what her doctor calls “marvelous stuff,” lithium. She eats Christmas dinner alone, but she hasn’t turned her back on life, attending dances and enjoying a collegial bond with her co-workers.

Most of the Empire’s crew is younger, including the punkish Janine (Hannah Onslow) and the observant and sympathetic junior manager, Neil (an endearing Tom Brooke). Closer to Hilary’s age is projectionist Norman, who’s played by Toby Jones in superb low-key form, making the character’s professional pride and love for the projection booth’s “complex machinery” utterly believable. The screenplay takes things a step too far, though, with his lofty pronouncements about the beam of light, the static frames, the optic nerve and the illusion of motion — all of which feel like authorial statements devoid of spontaneity, hitting the nail on the head, much like the movie’s title.

Hilary’s boss, Mr. Ellis ( Colin Firth , playing self-absorption to a T), is a humorless chap who regularly summons her to his office for sex in the shadows. When he and his wife (Sara Stewart) enter the same restaurant where she’s dining, Hilary, naturally, is the one who skedaddles. But with the arrival of a new employee, 20-ish Stephen ( Micheal Ward , of the Netflix series Top Boy ), things shift for her and she feels seen, tapping into reserves of joy and strength.

Mendes has planted his characters in a moment of time defined not just by Stir Crazy and Chariots of Fire , which, Ellis is proud to announce, will have its “regional gala premiere” at the Empire, but also by Thatcherism and racist skinhead violence. The racial theme is addressed with a touch that could have been lighter, rendering Wald’s character as someone more symbolic than fully fleshed — through no fault of the actor, who strikes intriguing, warm and sometimes inscrutable minor chords. As his mother, a single parent and nurse, Tanya Moodie makes an impression in her brief screen time, effortlessly demonstrating the source of Stephen’s integrity.

The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross taps into a nostalgic vein and the overall visual luster of the film, from the kaleidoscopic radiance of a funfair to the edge-of-the-world expanse of the shoreline. Tracks by Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens are well used — particularly the latter’s “Morning Has Broken,” providing a melodic and jarring counterpoint to an unsettling scene in which Hilary is at her most precarious.

As to a climactic catastrophe involving gangs of violent racist goons, you can hear the narrative cogs turning, distracting from the point Mendes is making; the scene is far less convincing than Stephen’s charged confrontation with a nasty customer (Ron Cook). Nothing in the film has a fraction of the dramatic impact of the emotional roller-coaster Colman’s performance embodies — the way her face lights up or registers a slight, the way she rages against cruelty, or, especially, the way she crashes a well-heeled gathering with lipstick on her teeth and a few lines of Auden to share.

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Empire of Light review: Sam Mendes strands Olivia Colman in an oddly impersonal love affair

There’s tender care in each frame, but this limp weepie is narratively ice cold, article bookmarked.

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There is a shallowness to Sam Mendes ’s Empire of Light , as if it’s more interested in grand displays of emotion than reflecting the full-body experience of someone’s life. Mendes has called it a tribute to his own mother. Others have declared it a love letter to cinema. So why is it so oddly impersonal? So cold? So closed off from its audience?

Set in 1981, within a fictional Margate cinema named the Empire, it concerns a love affair that seems predicated mostly on sorrow. Hilary Small ( Olivia Colman ), middle-aged, lives half-invisible with a psychiatric disorder. Stephen ( Micheal Ward ), significantly younger, is the son of Caribbean immigrants faced with the daily trauma of a racist England.

Both work at the Empire, Stephen newly employed. All it takes to nurture their romantic impulses is their discovery of a pigeon with a broken wing – they, of course, feel a kinship with this lonely, vulnerable creature. Empire of Light skips between their respective sufferings, always through the other’s eyes. Hilary watches, helpless, when Stephen is the victim of racist attacks. Stephen watches, helpless, when Hilary is chewed up and spit out by the health care system.

Mendes’s script, his first as a solo writer, deals with a sort of formless empathy – what it’s like to witness injustice and feel very, very bad about it. But it lacks necessary self-interrogation. There’s no real sense of purpose beyond the soothing of a privileged viewer’s guilt. The emotions are too thin, a set of codes to interpret rather than anything raw or real. Hilary’s soul-sickness is neatly summarised by the tragedy of the single cracker lying next to a Christmas-dinner-for-one, or by the repellent command of “suck me” by the Empire manager (Colin Firth) who regularly calls her into his office to demand listless handjobs.

Colman, who doesn’t seem to have an inauthentic bone in her body, takes hold of Hilary’s public breakdowns with both fists at the ready – she’s glorious in her untethering, with lipstick on her teeth. But we’re watching these characters from a distance, as if through warped glass, in a way that does a particular disservice to the quiet, internal collapse Ward conjures in Stephen. The most important figures in his life, Stephen’s mother Delia (Tanya Moodie) and his old girlfriend Ruby (Crystal Clarke), are such late additions to the story that they’re barely allowed to make an impression.

And what of this supposed “love letter to cinema”? There’s a hint of it in the cinematography of Mendes’s frequent collaborator, Roger Deakins ( Skyfall , 1917 ). There’s such tender care in each frame, in the way characters are haloed within the vast expanses of Mark Tildesley’s detailed production design. They look like saints plucked out of a triptych. It certainly achieves more than the sentimental speeches of projectionist Toby Norman (Toby Jones), or the background advertisements for contemporary films like The Blues Brothers , Stir Crazy , or Raging Bull .

Empire of Light ends on Hilary, a former film agnostic now converted, her teary features lit up by the projection playing on screen. It’s Hal Ashby’s Being There , featuring a late-career Peter Sellers (though Mendes never explores his almost ironic choice of movie, about a man raised by television finally stepping out into the outside world). The shot feels mechanically engineered for one of those “see you at the movies” montages at the Oscars, offering about the same insight as Nicole Kidman, in her viral ad for the US cinema chain AMC, declaring that “somehow heartbreak feels good in a place like this”. Empire of Light cares only that Hilary wear that heartbreak for all to see. What sparked it is anyone’s guess.

Dir: Sam Mendes. Starring: Olivia Colman, Micheal Ward, Tanya Moodie, Toby Jones, Colin Firth. 15, 115 minutes.

‘Empire of Light’ is in cinemas from Monday 9 January

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‘Empire of Light’ Isn’t the Shining, Important Movie It Thinks It Is

By David Fear

Nostalgia. Romance. Mental illness. Racism. The magic of the movies. Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light contains all of these elements, each of them gently sidling next to — and occasionally colliding clumsily into — each other. Any one of these subjects would be enough on their own to power a movie, especially one dedicated to looking back at the early years Thatcher’s bulldog-eat-bulldog Britain with equal emphasis on the good, the bad, and the ugliness. Weave them together, and you could emerge with an Altmanesque tapestry piece that views a certain moment in time from a variety of angles. Or: you could end up making a movie that strives to be about every one of these things without actually being about any of them.

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Still, Empire of Light does feel designed to play like a memory piece, albeit one that only taps in to the maudlin aspects and leaves everything else the subgenre does well on the cutting room floor. The depictions of Hilary’s 100-klieg bursts of sunniness and outbursts of rage, her retreats into reclusiveness and fuzzy returns to “normal,” may be personal for Mendes (and Colman handles these scenes with sensitivity and commitment like the pro she is). Yet there’s something slightly distant about this time-travel trip, something disconnected — it’s the rare remember-when narrative that feels both way too sentimental and way, way too chilly at the same time. Even the movie love is muted. Yes, the slow death of places where people dream in the dark is symbolically powerful. But story-wise, Hilary and her fellow ticket jockeys could work anywhere. Her 11th-hour conversion to film nerddom, courtesy of Jones’ projectionist showing her Being There after hours, feels like an afterthought.

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Empire of Light Is Somber, Static, and Shallow

A grim yellow pall hangs over the drab, empty spaces of Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light . Its source is, at least part of the time, the giant lit letters of the movie theater where much of the picture takes place. Perhaps they were there once to evoke grandeur and brightness; the Empire theater, we learn, was once a huge, elegant, multiscreen palace. Now, as filmed by Mendes and the great Roger Deakins, the mood is all stasis, sadness, sickly solitude. An obvious metaphor, yes, but perhaps also an appropriate visual signifier for this story about loneliness, mental illness, and racism set in a coastal town in southeast England circa 1981. And it’s just one of the many ways that all life appears to have been drained out of this movie.

Mendes is a filmmaker who likes to come up with visual correlatives to convey his heady themes, but there can, at times, be a dutiful quality to these conceits. The two figures at the center of Empire of Light — Hilary (Olivia Colman), the longtime duty manager of the Empire, and Stephen (Micheal Ward), a young Black employee to whom she takes a fancy — seem more like ideas for characters than actual people. The middle-aged Hilary lives by herself and spends much of her off time at the Empire. Occasionally, she’s called in by the theater’s married manager, Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth), to have a wan little tryst in his office. We learn from an early doctor visit that Hilary has been taking lithium. “Marvelous stuff,” the physician opines, but Hilary wants to stop taking it.

Hilary is fascinated by Stephen almost as soon as he arrives. He’s young, handsome, and from another world — a rudeboy with a stingy brim hat and three-button Tonic suit, fond of reggae and punk, a child of Caribbean immigrants who doesn’t have much to do now that many of his friends have “buggered off to college.” But we never really get into his life or hers. The script (by Mendes, his first solo writing credit) spends a lot of time with these two characters but doesn’t actually give them that much to do. Their relationship doesn’t feel particularly liberating or lively or even needful. It just kind of happens, presumably because the movie needs a plot; in its own way, their dalliance is as drab and sad as Hilary’s sour little encounters with the perpetually frowning Mr. Ellis. The director was reportedly inspired by his own mother’s struggles with mental illness in writing this film. That speaks to his sincerity, but maybe he’s too close to the material this time around. I’d argue that his beautiful 2008 adaptation of Revolutionary Road is a more incisive and tender look at a character’s fraying psyche.

It’s not so much that there’s anything wrong with Empire of Light ; it’s just that there isn’t anything particularly right with it. Perhaps Mendes simply wants to place us in this world and let the oppressive atmosphere take over, à la something by Tsai Ming-liang. (Think Stray Dogs .) But I’m not sure he has the attention to texture or detail to pull that off — and, besides, his setting isn’t nearly immersive or captivating enough. His actors are solid: Colman’s achievements could probably fill a book by this point, and Ward has proven his chops in everything from Blue Story to Lovers Rock . But they can do only so much with such underwritten characters.

And so the film goes through the motions with Hilary and Stephen. We know the relationship won’t last. We know her mental situation will fray. We know the racism of early-1980s Britain will rear its ugly head in multiple ways, both violent and psychological. Aside from one rather terrifying scene when a skinhead protest thunders outside the doors of the theater and racist hooligans burst their way inside, none of the story’s inevitable turns happen in an interesting or emotionally engaging way. For all the energy expended on the look of this film, there’s nothing much onscreen. By the time Empire of Light was all over, I didn’t feel as if I knew anything about these two characters at all.

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‘Empire of Light’ Review: Movies Are Magic, But Not This One

Olivia colman — and pep talks about turning to movies in times of despair — can't save this sam mendes film about a dying art deco theater in a once-popular seaside town..

The trend this holiday season (great actors in mediocre, maudlin movies) continues apace with phenomenal award-winning Olivia Colman in Empire of Light, working hard to prove she can play downtrodden social rejects with the same dignity as the upper-class heroines and British royalty at which she usually excels (she won the 2018 Best Actress Oscar as Queen Anne in The Favourite).    Under the often reliable guidance of writer-director Sam Mendes , she now tackles the difficult and only intermittently worthy role of a paranoid schizophrenic named Hilary, suffering bouts of mental collapse while dragging herself through the snow each day to sell licorice and cigarettes at the concession stand of a dying Art Deco movie house called the Empire in a once-popular seaside town on the south coast of England. A fading relic of bygone days, the Empire still attracts old standby customers who come in to get out of the cold and pass the time watching junk films like The Blues Brothers and Smokey and the Bandit.  

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Hilary leads an empty, desolate life, staring at the snow, popping tranquilizers, and succumbing from time to time to the sexual assignations of her handsome, white-haired, abusive, unhappily married boss (a wasted, ill-advised Colin Firth , of all people).  Other members of the meager, slowly decreasing staff include Stephen (Micheal Wright), a young black newcomer who acts as a handyman, and Norman, the proud projectionist (strongly played by the great British character actor Toby Jones , who many believe should have won an Oscar for his sensational screen portrayal of Truman Capote instead of the late Philip Seymour Hofffman). His duty in the film is to offer occasional pep talks about the magic of movies and their ability to uplift the senses in times of despair.

His optimism is the film’s badly needed undercurrent, but it falls on deaf ears. Middle-aged, white, bipolar Hilary spends long absences from work in mental institutions, zoned out on lithium. And black, college-age Stephen, whose skin color places him in harm’s way, is violently beaten on his way home from the Empire by the skinhead punks in a motorcycle gang. The muddled romance born of their mutual loneliness and desperation for companionship comes to nothing, and we’re left with a film that swerves between a dull psychological study of mental illness, an implausible love story with no payoff, and a social observation of England’s changing socio-political scene in the 1980s. Watching the misguided artistry at work in Empire of Light, it’s hard to fathom just what attracted so many top-tier talents to a project of such torpor.  

A wasted talent is as sad as an empty mind, and we’re getting a lot of it this holiday season.

Observer Reviews are regular assessments of new and noteworthy cinema.

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Lee (2024) Review

Lee begins with the sound of a heart beating, fast. We see Kate Winslet’s Lee Miller, camera round her neck, finding cover among booms of explosions all around her. It’s clear what director Ellen Kuras is trying to tell us with this opening — that this is a woman who’ll go to any lengths to get the shot. It’s an exhilarating start, even if the rest of the film never quite matches it.

This biopic of the legendary war photographer begins in 1938. Miller is hanging out with friends in France, when she meets eventual husband Roland (Alexander Skarsgård, charming as ever but with a dodgy English accent). They head to London, but as time ticks on and the impact of Hitler’s rise to power moves closer to them, she’s compelled to get involved. After getting a job at Vogue , she travels out to the frontlines, capturing the fight from a unique perspective despite facing constant gender-based barriers to access.

Kate Winslet is formidable as Lee Miller.

Winslet is formidable as Miller. The years she’s spent getting this passion project off the ground are evident in every expression. She’s a powerful presence, grumpy and confident and sexy and vulnerable all at once — but as a character, ultimately feels as enigmatic as it seems the real-life woman was. We see her highs and her lows, but never quite get properly under her skin.

She bounces off Andrea Riseborough’s prim but warm Vogue editor Audrey Withers brilliantly. The gem of the supporting cast, however, is Andy Samberg as fellow photographer David E. Scherman. Stripping back his comedic genius and showing off his dramatic chops, Samberg wonderfully portrays David as a man who will support Lee in all she does, who is maybe even a little bit in love with her, and who, as a Jewish man, is struggling to comprehend the trauma this war is inflicting on his people. The film’s most emotional scene sees David and Lee photograph a pile of bodies, their horror and deep sadness emanating through the screen as they take one single frame — and the recreation of them shooting Miller in Hitler’s bathtub, muddy boots on the bathmat, is spine-tingling.

Lee ’s biggest flaw is its commitment to sticking to stale structures — the telling of her life story is framed through the well-trodden trope of an interview decades in the future. Though the focus on photography that dealt with war’s impact on women is obviously important, the way it’s dramatised here can feel clichéd and crow-barred in. But while it may be hampered by convention, this is still a story that demands to be told, and such a strong cast means you can’t help but be invested.

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