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"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.

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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.

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Film credits.

Empire of Light (2022)

Rated R for sexual content, language and brief violence.

115 minutes

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

Cinematographer

• Roger Deakins
• Trent Reznor
• Atticus Ross

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“Empire of Light,” Reviewed: Sam Mendes’s Synthetic Paean to Movie Magic

By Richard Brody

The writer and director Sam Mendes’s new film, “Empire of Light,” centered on the employees of an English movie theatre in the early nineteen-eighties, belongs to a genre unto itself: cooking-show cinema. Mendes seems to have given himself a list of mandatory ingredients and develops the film to fit them all in, however clumsily. There’s no intrinsic problem with conspicuous contrivance or a willful cinematic collage, whether involving the Marx Brothers or the New Wave. The trouble with Mendes’s film is in the effort to combine the pieces in a way that feels natural, in an artifice that’s devised to be nearly invisible. It’s a synthetic that presents itself as organic. In the process, the film smothers its authentic parts, never lets its drama take root and grow, never lets its characters come to life.

Olivia Colman stars as Hilary Small, the so-called duty manager of a spectacularly appointed movie theatre in a provincial seaside town on the southern coast of England. (The movie was filmed at Margate.) She is on the cusp of middle age, and her solitude appears to weigh on her. She lives alone, she eats alone, she seems to have little social life outside of her cordial association with her colleagues. At the start of the action, just before Christmas, she has recently returned to work after a stay in a mental hospital; at her doctor’s office, she tells him that she’s feeling “numb,” which he attributes to the lithium that she takes. (She lies to him about having family and friends to talk to.)

Hilary is also having an affair, of sorts, with her boss, Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth), the theatre’s general manager, who is married. She’s a reader with a fund of poetry to quote, seemingly a literary person who appears out of place in her daily role overseeing ticket sales, dispensing popcorn and candy, cleaning the theatre, tidying Ellis’s office, and organizing the other half-dozen or so employees’ time and tasks. She doesn’t seem bored, she doesn’t seem miserable—she merely seems mechanical. Then Ellis hires a new employee to help with ticket sales and other practicalities, Stephen Murray (Micheal Ward), a cheerful and eager young man whose elegant wit and easy curiosity sets him apart from the others; he and Hilary become fast friends, and then lovers. (He’s the first to pursue the friendship; she’s the first to demonstrate romantic feelings.) Stephen harbors the unfulfilled ambition go to university to become an architect. Hilary encourages him to pursue his dream, and, thanks to him, she begins to come out of her shell.

Stephen is Black, a fact that’s of no significance among his white colleagues, who are friendly and welcoming, but one that proves to be of appalling importance in general. He is confronted in the theatre by a patron who makes racist remarks, and the town is infested with white supremacists who, emboldened by British nativist politicians and enraged by Black British people’s demands for equal rights, harass Stephen in the street and turn increasingly dangerous. Meanwhile, his relationship with Hilary begins to take a toll on both of them, as their co-workers begin to suspect something.

Hilary is reprising the kind of relationship that she and Ellis have had—not just one among colleagues but one between a supervisor and a subordinate. That—along with (perhaps) the racial difference, along with (perhaps) the age difference, along with (perhaps) the fact that Stephen is still grieving over a failed romantic relationship with another woman, along with (perhaps) his academic ambitions—comes between them and threatens to push Hilary into crisis mode. That crisis, a story of past troubles and past horrors, of a hard childhood and subsequent abuses, of thwarted dreams and stifled rage, is the emotional core of the film.

Hilary is something of a classic character: a sad sack. In American movies, a sad sack is a sociopath-in-waiting, a ticking time bomb preparing to explode, whereas a British sad sack is merely a human machine going through the motions of life, a ticking clock that is simply winding down. American society, thin on formalities, exerts little pressure on solitary characters, whereas British life, which is more formal and punctilious, may add structure to lives that otherwise have little of it. That’s where “Empire of Light” is at its best; in treating Hilary like a compressed figure, shaped from the outside by social forces, Mendes tries (and, to a limited extent, manages) to show not the character but the forces themselves, to show the mold into which the character has been pushed, deformed, tormented. But the dramatic result of showing the mold rather than the character is the lack of detail in characterization—which wouldn’t be an issue if the movie weren’t a character study.

Mendes builds the movie mainly in dialogue scenes that often start promisingly, that show his protagonists confiding and confessing, struggling to express themselves and beginning to find the strength to do so. But they are typically cut short (whether by Mendes’s editorial will or by the mere limit of his own screenwriterly imagination) once the scene dispenses the tidbits of information that fit into the tight dramatic mosaic. It’s a movie filled with its perhapses and its vaguenesses, and the characters turn up only enough cards to keep viewers guessing at the table. The movie plays ambiguously with Hilary’s illness, to significant symbolic ends but frustrating dramatic ones: Mendes suggests that it’s the unchallenged assumptions of social life, of gender relationships, that are sick—that what Hilary has endured is enough to depress and derange any woman sensitive enough to take stock of the dire situation. It’s a rhetorical notion that the film places alongside the overt racist pathologies afflicting England; Mendes, in putting an age gap between Hilary and Stephen, also suggests a changing generational approach to endemic abuses and systemic injustices.

The movie’s motives and premises are its strengths. Its utter absence of detail, nuance, inner life, and complex expression are its failures. Its connection to the world of movies, as a subject, is simply incongruous, although the theatre itself is a virtual character in the film—the building is a kind of masterwork of populist modernism, and its slender yet slablike parts and its asymmetrical perpendicularity are meshed with Art Deco details and lavishly comfortable furnishings. Hilary has little connection to movies, but a great one to the building itself—and to past graces that it harbors, ghostlike, in a shuttered upstairs ballroom that formerly hosted dances. (The theatre’s marquee still advertises that erstwhile attraction.) Her association with it remains (yes, again) unspecified. As for the cinema itself, its glories are incarnated by the theatre’s longtime projectionist, Norman (Toby Jones), who decorates his booth with the iconography of classic movies and their stars. Norman talks about the equipment of 35-mm. projection with love and initiates the curious and technically adept Stephen in that love, too.

“Empire of Light” gets its title from the wry illusions of Magritte, but reflects none of their self-deflating humor or conspicuous delight in deception. Rather, it builds to a grand, nostalgic, sentimental paean to the art of popular movies, and does so with no irony, no sense of history, no self-questioning of the art form itself. Mendes doesn’t contemplate or hint at the connection between the Hollywood movies (and the British hits) of the era and the social crises that he diagnoses, between mass media and mass politics, between the mores of movies and the ways of private life and public discourse. Instead, Mendes nostalgically connects himself to a fading and troubled past, without ambivalence or self-doubt, as if he had the recipe for its redemption. ♦

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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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While Mendes is more than happy to give his actors a lovely showcase for their conversational banter, he’s also not staging a period-piece riff on Annie Baker’s Pulitzer-winning play The Flick. Melodrama is already hovering around the edges, in the form of taunting skinheads and hostile customers and enigmatic doctor visits. It’s hinted that Hilary has a history of instability, and that the introduction of a deeper connection with Stephen means she also may be off her meds. A day trip to the beach hints at greater, more pendulum-like mood swings to come, as well as the idea that an interracial relationship isn’t widely accepted in a place like this or an era like the early 1980s, when the National Front was stirring shit up.

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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.

The racial aspects serve to remind viewers that the past is never really past, plus ça change, et al. Yet that too feels oddly obligatory, with the film playing up the animosity just for conflict and peeking into the home life of Stephen and his mother (Tanya Moodie) out of sheer courtesy. You never doubt the divisiveness of the times — you just don’t get deeper than headlines and clichés here. Colman’s performance keeps pushing things forward, offering glimpses of messy realities and genuine struggles, yet big-picture illuminating this is not. The sun sets on Empire of Light long before the movie itself fades out.

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Movie Reviews

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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• Entertainment

‘Empire of Light’ review: Olivia Colman shines in this Sam Mendes drama

Movie review.

The Shakespeare quote “Find where light in darkness lies” is painted on the lobby wall at the Empire, a handsomely fading 1930s cineplex that faces the sea in a small British town. The setting is the heart of Sam Mendes’ drama “Empire of Light,” and the quote feels appropriate for a place where audiences sit in shadows, happily mesmerized by the images in a flickering beam. And it nicely sums up the film itself, which goes to difficult places but ultimately leaves its audience with poetry and light.

It’s the early 1980s, and middle-aged Hilary (Olivia Colman) is the longtime duty manager for the Empire, where she supervises a staff mostly much younger than she is, and quietly moves through her uneventful life. She lives alone, seems to have no friends or personal connections (other than a secret, subservient affair with the married theater manager, played with oily precision by Colin Firth), and struggles to move beyond some past episodes of mental illness, for which she takes medication that leaves her feeling, in her words, “a bit numb.” But Hilary finds a connection with a new employee, Stephen (Micheal Ward), a Black college-age man who’s himself feeling alienated in their very homogenous town. A tentative relationship ensues, as does trouble.

“Empire of Light” is clearly a very personal film for Mendes (who has spoken in interviews about his mother’s struggles with mental illness) and its minor flaws are the sort of thing that can happen when you’re very close to something. Stephen occasionally seems rather too saintly (a couple of scenes involving a wounded pigeon feel a little too spot-on), and the way the cinema’s projectionist (Toby Jones) talks about film seems better suited to a reverent documentary than a realistic drama. (Though he does present a rich metaphor to consider: Film consists of static frames with darkness between them, but when it’s projected correctly, you don’t see the darkness.)

But it’s a film full of lovely, poignant detail: Hilary eating dinner alone, with a sole Christmas cracker next to her plate; the quiet, knowing gaze of Stephen’s mother (Tanya Moodie); the lovingly filmed shots (the gorgeous cinematography is from longtime Mendes collaborator Roger Deakins) of an empty cinema waiting for dreams to come; the old-school art of watching for the tiny flash that alerts a projectionist that a reel change is imminent; the way Firth’s Mr. Ellis pours Glenfiddich for himself and Hilary, but gives her much less; the tiny smudge of lipstick on Hilary’s teeth, indicating her inner turmoil.

And Colman, on whose face the film frequently rests (does anyone in cinema have a more open, guileless smile?), quietly holds the drama in her hands. Her Hilary is fragile, yet touchingly determined to will herself toward the light. “Empire of Light” brings hope at the end — for her, for Stephen, for the impromptu family that forms at the Empire — and poignantly reminds us of the everyday miracle of movies.  

With Olivia Colman, Michael Ward, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Tanya Moodie. Written and directed by Sam Mendes. 119 minutes. Rated R for sexual content, language and brief violence. Opens Dec. 9 at multiple theaters.

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Empire Of Light Review

09 Jan 2023

Empire Of Light

Sam Mendes ’ last film, the one-shot war epic 1917 , was a tribute to his grandfather, a World War I veteran. Empire Of Light , his latest, is an understated, 1980s-set drama set in a creaking old seaside picturehouse — a handbrake turn in every way. But there is a personal element to this storytelling, too: Mendes has spoken about this being a tribute to his mother, who suffered from mental illness. The result is a period melodrama which tries earnestly to be many things at once, not all successfully: a mismatched romance, a portrait of a nervous breakdown, a snapshot of Thatcher’s racially charged Britain, and a love letter, of sorts, to cinema.

When we meet Hilary ( Olivia Colman ), she is a listless cinema worker engaging in a suffocatingly unromantic extramarital affair with the manager (played by Colin Firth , as a kind of anti-Darcy). It slowly emerges that Hilary has had a history of mental-health issues, and moves through the world numbed by antidepressants. It’s yet another extraordinary, soul-shattering performance from Colman, even if sometimes Hilary’s story falls prey to melodrama’s lazier impulses; occasionally you can feel the buttons being pushed.

As Hilary's health dominated proceedings, the promise of a Cinema Paradiso -esque elegy starts to fade.

Then along comes Stephen ( Micheal Ward ), who injects some light into Hilary’s bleak existence. Though he is something of a manic pixie dream boy — he nurses a pigeon back to health, a metaphor about as subtle as a punch in the face — and feels clumsily shoehorned in as a means of teaching Racism 101 for guileless white characters, he is at least charismatically played by Ward. It’s an impressive calling-card for future leading-man roles.

As Hilary’s health dominates proceedings, the promise of a Cinema Paradiso -esque elegy, implied by the title (and marketing), starts to fade. Often the cinema feels like a supporting character, an ancillary element relegated to mere window-dressing. For a cinematic love letter, the characters seem curiously incurious about the films being shown; only Toby Jones’ projectionist teeters towards cinephile territory.

But what window-dressing! With typically skilful cinematography from Roger Deakins and period-accurate production design from Mark Tildesley, Mendes summons a very specific time and place, one that will be instantly familiar to British people of a certain age bracket: a time of economic pessimism, frilly curtains, and unflattering NHS glasses. The filmmakers find a strange beauty in this bleakness, especially in the grand, old-world nobility of the cinema itself: two of the screens are closed, seemingly condemned, and Hilary and Stephen forge a secretive romance in an empty ballroom which is made to seem like some lost archeological treasure. In the wake of the pandemic, it arouses a real sense of cinemagoing’s inherent fragility.

At its best, it is genuinely evocative, and while the script (by Mendes, his first as solo screenwriter) is patchy, it also wisely leaves the camera — plus Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ delicate, pensive score — to do a lot of the talking. As a whole, it doesn’t quite cohere, but you can at least feel the sincere, sentimental intent with which it’s made.

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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 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.

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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’ 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

Chief Film Critic

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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’ Review: They Found It at the Movies

Olivia Colman and Micheal Ward pursue a bittersweet workplace romance in Sam Mendes’s look back at Britain in the early 1980s.

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By A.O. Scott

“Empire of Light” takes place in and around an old movie palace in a British seaside town. This cinema, which is called the Empire, is more than a mere setting: it’s the movie’s center of gravity, its soul, its governing metaphor and reason for being.

In the early 1980s, the Empire has fallen on hard times, rather like the global power evoked by its name. The sun hasn’t quite set, but the upstairs screens are now permanently dark, and a once-sumptuous lounge on the top floor is frequented mainly by pigeons. The public still shows up to buy popcorn and candy, and to see films like “The Blues Brothers,” “Stir Crazy” and “All That Jazz,” but the mood is one of quietly accepted defeat. Even the light looks tired.

That light is also beautiful, thanks to the unrivaled cinematographer Roger Deakins , whose images impart a tone of gentle nostalgia. It’s possible to look back fondly on a less-than-golden age, and Sam Mendes (“Revolutionary Road,” “1917”), the writer and director, casts an affectionate gaze on the Empire, its employees, and the drab, sometimes brutal realities of Thatcher-era Britain.

“Empire of Light” has a sad story to tell, one that touches on mental illness, sexual exploitation, racist violence and other grim facts of life. But Mendes isn’t a realist in the mode of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. The period-appropriate British movies that find their way to the Empire’s screens are “Gregory’s Girl” and “Chariots of Fire,” and Mendes borrows some of their sweet, gentle humor and heartfelt humanist charm.

Olivia Colman plays Hilary, the Empire’s duty manager, who oversees a motley squad of cinema soldiers. There is a nerdy guy, a post-punk girl and a grumpy projectionist. They are soon joined by Stephen (Micheal Ward), a genial young man whose college plans are on hold.

Hilary and her boss, Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth), are carrying on a desultory affair. For her, the rushed encounters in his office are part of a dreary workplace routine, evidence of an ongoing malaise. Things could always be worse, and for Hilary, they have been. She has recently returned to work after spending time in a mental hospital after a breakdown and takes lithium to maintain her equilibrium.

Stephen’s arrival jolts her out of her torpor, which is both exciting and risky. He seems more open to experience, more capable of happiness, than anyone else in this grubby little city, and he and Hilary strike up a friendship that turns into more. His encounters with hostile skinheads and bigoted customers open Hilary’s eyes to the pervasiveness of racial prejudice. Together they nurse a wounded pigeon back to health.

For a while, their romance unfolds in a quiet, quotidian rhythm that allows you to appreciate Colman and Ward’s fine-grained performances. “What are days?” the poet Philip Larkin asked — he’s a favorite of Hilary’s, along with W.H. Auden — and his answer was both somber and sublime. “Days are where we live.” The daily rituals of work at the Empire, and the pockets of free time that open up within it, add a dimension of understated enchantment, as if a touch of big-screen magic found its way into the break room, the concession stand and the box office.

It’s inevitable that the spell will break, and when it does, “Empire of Light” falters. Mendes raises the stakes and accelerates the plot, pushing Hilary and Stephen through a series of crises that weigh the movie down with earnest self-importance. A film that had seemed interested in the lives and feelings of its characters, and in an unlikely but touching relationship between two people at odds with the world around them, turns into a movie with Something to Say.

The message is muddled and soft, like a Milk Dud at the bottom of the box, and the movie chews on it for quite a while. “Empire of Light” arrives at its emotional terminus long before it actually ends. Things keep happening, as if Mendes were trying to talk himself and us through ideas that hadn’t been fully worked out. There isn’t really much insight to be gleaned on the subjects of mental illness, racial politics, middle age or work, though an earnest effort is made to show concern about all of them.

What “Empire of Light” really wants to be about are the pleasures of ’80s pop music, fine English poetry and, above all, movies. Like everyone else at the Empire, the grumpy projectionist takes a liking to Stephen, and shows him how to work the machinery, eliciting exclamations of wonder from the young man, and also from old-timers in the audience who might remember the vanished sights and sounds of celluloid. The velvet ropes and plush seats, the beam of light and the whirring — it’s all lovely and bittersweet to contemplate.

Movies have always been more than a source of comfort: They have the power to disturb, to seduce, to provoke and to enrage. None of that really interests Mendes here, even though the story of Hilary and Stephen might have benefited from a tougher, less sentimental telling.

Empire of Light Rated R. Sex and violence, just like in the movies. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Empire of Light Reviews

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

A tribute to how kindness creates friendships and how movies can be transformative.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 28, 2023

Empire of Light works best as an homage to movie theaters, and cinema itself, as a necessary escape from reality. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | May 1, 2023

There are scenes that try to spectacularly intertwine political strife with personal drama in a way that may be reminiscent of Alfonso Cuarón's cinema... yet in this film, they feel excessively abrupt. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 24, 2023

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‘Empire of Light’ Review: Sam Mendes’ Ode to Movie Theaters Isn’t Worth Seeing in One

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures releases the film in theaters on Friday, December 9.

Despite being set in the early 1980s (its story spanning from “The Blues Brothers” to “Being There”), Sam Mendes ’ scattershot and moribund “ Empire of Light ” is a movie born out of two simultaneous but unequal reckonings that erupted in the summer of 2020: The Black Lives Matter movement, and the existential threat to the future of movie theaters. Looking at those phenomena through the (not particularly nostalgic) lens of his teenage years in “there’s no such thing as society” England — a time when racism and cinema were both thriving in popular culture — Mendes strives to tell a plaintive yet poignant little story about the simple power of community.

It’s a story about a magical where light and dark mesh together to create magic, and where people can enjoy the pleasure of being surrounded by strangers without fear of being watched. As Nicole Kidman might put it: “Even the Margaret Thatcher era feels good in a place like this.” Merciful as it is that “Empire of Light” stops just short of suggesting that AMC might be our secret weapon in the fight against white nationalism, Mendes’ rear-projected view of the modern world is still too clumsy and stilted to offer any heartbreaking insights of its own. All it manages to leave us with is a warm breakthrough performance from Micheal Ward, a twinkly new score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and a fantastic clip of Olivia Colman shouting “To fuck, or not to fuck, that is the question!” while the “Chariots of Fire” music hums behind her in the background.

Less of an ode to movies than an ode to movie theaters — less “Cinema Paradiso” than Annie Baker’s play “The Flick” — “Empire of Light” eschews the strictly autobiographical flavor that has run through the recent spate of “personal stories” from major filmmakers. That doesn’t explain why this contribution to this Oscar-friendly sub-genre lacks the heart-on-the-screen vulnerability that buoyed the similarly frustrating likes of “Belfast” and “Bardo,” but Mendes’ decision not to build this movie around a stand-in for himself becomes a fitting expression of our inability to see him in it.

The story Mendes chooses to tell with the first script he’s ever written from scratch on his own is a May-December romance about two employees at a Margate cinema — the Empire — along the northern shore of Kent. Hilary Small (Colman) is a lonely middle-aged woman who appears to have worked there for quite some time; or maybe the picture house’s sniveling owner (Colin Firth as Mr. Ellis) has only made her the manager so that he has an excuse to call her into his office and demand a less-than-enthusiastic handjob. Hilary doesn’t resist the sexual harassment for the same reason that she doesn’t resist anything else: The lithium she received after being discharged from the mental institution has left her numb to the world.

New employee Stephen (Ward) fixes that in a hurry. Young, handsome, and capable of being a great architect if only the graduate schools he applied to hadn’t rejected him for the color of his skin, Stephen is a corked bottle of unspent enthusiasm, and his smile alone is enough to spark Hilary back to life. She can’t imagine that he would ever return his affections, and Mendes’ script never sufficiently explains why he might.

The age gap between these characters doesn’t require any suspension of disbelief, but no attempt is made to articulate what draws Stephen towards a co-worker who’s sad and severe even in the hokey scenes meant to establish a mutual attraction (they find a bird in the cinema’s shuttered upper floors and bind its broken wing together). Their first kiss comes a few short hours after Hilary snaps at Stephen for cruelly mocking a customer behind their back.

It’s eventually implied that the co-workers bond over a shared feeling of shame, as each of them are belittled in their own way, but Mendes strands his excellent lead actors to grasp at the straws offered by his patchy script. Even the most tender moments between them are undone by irksomely broad displays of mental illness and/or clunky illustrations of the racist attitudes that backdrop Stephen and Hilary’s brief affair. The former ring false despite the palpable volatility of Colman’s rage, while the latter — contextualized by the Brixton riots and the emergence of the National Front — are exclusively seen through the eyes of an oblivious white woman who’s as numb to the world as she is to herself. Even in 1981, the scene where Hilary buys Stephen a two-tone album because “Black kids and white kids meeting up together makes it all normal” would have landed like a lead balloon.

The only compelling character in “Empire of Light” is the Empire itself, which Mendes’ production team has recreated from the scrapheap of his memory with palpable love and immaculate attention to detail. While it’s only towards the very end that we get to watch part of a movie from inside one of the theater’s lavish auditoriums (a sadistic act of withholding meant to reflect Hilary’s own disinterest in what goes on at her place of work), even the lobby of the Empire is effective as a time machine.

The magic starts with the brilliantly lit marquee outside and continues down to the concession stand and up along the red velvet carpets before culminating in the projection booth where a finicky man called Norman (the ever-reliable Toby Jones) operates the massive pieces of machinery that bring dreams to life. Roger Deakins’ camera may have grown unaccustomed to such quotidian sights, but it lavishes the same attention over the backrooms and big screens of this movie palace as if Hilary and Stephen were James Bonds or Blade Runners.

All told, the Empire seems like an excellent place to see a movie, particularly if it weren’t this one. The most amusing subplot amid this too-distracted story involves Mr. Ellis’ Dwight Schrute-like efforts to stage the “regional gala premiere” of “Chariots of Fire,” a cringe-inducing spectacle that concludes with a bit of borrowed poetry in a film that struggles to generate any other kind.

“Empire of Light” advances forward in awkward fits and starts, occasionally threatening to cohere together into something greater than its parts before finally collapsing under its own weight at the exact moment when the real world spills into the sacred realm of the cinema. Mendes struggles to visualize how one might exist within the other, which might help to explain why his best films (“Road to Perdition,” “Skyfall”) have been so heightened and eager to leave reality behind. “Empire of Light” may think of itself as an ode to community, but it only feels honest when celebrating the movies for their escapism. How strange and telling that when we finally see someone watching a movie at the Empire, they’re watching it alone.

It’s wonderful that Mendes spent the pandemic making a movie about the irreplaceable vitality of movie theaters — even going so far as to paint them as one of the final strings in what’s left of our social fabric. It would have been even better if he spent the pandemic making a movie worth seeing in one.

“Empire of Light” premiered at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures will release it in theaters on Friday, December 9.

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Godzilla x Kong Smashes New Box Office Milestone Amid High Praise from Hideo Kojima

Hideo Kojima has shared a longer than usual review of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire as the movie hit Japanese cinemas.

• Hideo Kojima gives a glowing review of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire , praising its authentic monster movie action and growth.
• The film breaks $500M at the box office worldwide, hinting at the continuation of the MonsterVerse with more potential sequels.
• Fans hail Kojima's review as a big win for the franchise as Godzilla and Kong's popularity continues to grow on the big screen.

The debut of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire in Japan has finally brought the MonsterVerse’s latest offering to the home country of the kaiju. That has led iconic video game creator Hideo Kojima – who has also become well-known for sharing his very succinct views on new movies – to give his verdict on the monster mash-up movie. It seems that, like many fans around the world, for Kojima, the latest addition to the blockbuster franchise is a hit.

Sharing his views on his X/Twitter account , Kojima was full of praise for Adam Wingard’s latest foray into the MonsterVerse, so much so that he delivered one of his longest reviews of any movie in a long while. He said:

“I watched "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.” It was a monster movie from "Toho Champion Festival" that I was crazy about as a child. It reminded me of the "speech bubbles" between Godzilla and Anguirus in "Godzilla vs. Gigan". If you can take something borrowed from Toho this far, that’s impressive. While many Godzilla movies cannot escape from the spell of "Godzilla (1954)," this film is a genuine monster movie that depicts monster action, monster battles, and their growth and drama without too much human drama. It is typical in yakuza films for rivals to join forces for a time in the face of a powerful enemy, but the hints of friendship in this film are very touching. In a sense, it’s no lie that it "crosses the line.” The tone of the film can be understood by watching Kong suffering from a toothache at the beginning of the film.”

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

Fans of Kojima, and the Warner Bros. franchise, hailed the review as a “big win” for the MonsterVerse, and it cannot really be understated that is not just big…it is kaiju-sized. For the future of the franchise, this is just another sign that Godzilla and Kong have some way to run on the big screen in their meaty, popcorn-fodder outings.

Godzilla x Kong Has Smashed Through Another Huge Box Office Milestone

Over the past weekend, thanks to the Japanese launch of the film, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire has now broken through the $500 million mark worldwide. There was always an expectation that he film would prove to be a box office behemoth based off the performance of its predecessor. Godzilla vs. Kong hit cinemas in 2021, but was also released on VOD at the same time due to the Covid pandemic . Despite the timing of the release, the movie ended its theatrical run on a gross of $470 million, including $100.9 million from its domestic sales.

5 Ways Godzilla x Kong Sets up a Son of Kong Sequel

This time around, as part of its total haul – which at time of writing stands at $519 million – the MonsterVerse movie is heading towards doubling the domestic takings of Godzilla vs. Kong, having taken over $181 million. This is certainly good news for Wingard, who has already hinted that he has ideas for the next movie , but also for the franchise itself as it continues to grow with the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters series getting the green-light for a second season and more spin-offs being masterminded as we speak.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is still playing in theaters.

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Hideo kojima reviews godzilla x kong, calls latest monsterverse entry "impressive" & "very touching.

Acclaimed video game developer Hideo Kojima shares his thoughts on Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, celebrating the latest Monsterverse entry.

• Hideo Kojima praises Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire for its action and drama, highlighting the unexpected bond between the titular creatures.
• The Monsterverse franchise shows strength in balancing human drama and kaiju spectacle, proving its appeal to audiences.
• The success of Godzilla x Kong and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters points to a bright future for the Monsterverse, endorsed by Kojima.

Acclaimed video game developer Hideo Kojima shares his thoughts on Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire in a brief review. Directed by Adam Wingard, the latest Monsterverse chapter sees Godzilla and Kong become unlikely allies when threats from beneath the surface of the Earth threaten to disrupt the balance of the planet. Despite mixed reviews, Godzilla x Kong is still a financial hit , becoming the second highest-grossing movie at the global box office in 2024 so far with $519 million.

With Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire solidifying itself as one of 2024's strongest movies, Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid developer Kojima has shared his thoughts on the latest Monsterverse chapter through his personal Twitter account.

Reminded of his own childhood experiences with kaiju movies, Kojima praised the movie's action and drama between the titular creatures, highlighting how it manages to explore an unexpected budding bond between Godzilla and Kong. Kojima was also keen to praise the movie for how it characterized each Titan through smaller moments within the narrative.

How 2024 Is Allowing The Monsterverse To Prove Itself

Godzilla x kong and monarch lean into the franchise's strengths.

While a mixed critical reception and comparisons to Toho-made Godzilla productions stirred plenty of discussions surrounding Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and other Monsterverse entries, it is clear 2024 has shown the franchise's strengths can still help it stand on its own. While audiences were gripped by Godzilla Minus One 's rich human drama and strong commentary in the fall of 2023, leading to a surprising Oscar win, it is clear they are also keen to see the sheer spectacle battling kaiju can offer. 2024 has shown that the Monsterverse is capable of both.

First airing in November 2023 and running until January 2024, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters brought the Monsterverse's action to the small screen on Apple TV+ across ten episodes. Exploring a multi-generational tale about the rise of the Monarch organization and their post- Godzilla dealings, the series turns the franchise's lens to the humans living with emerging Titans. As such, Legacy of Monsters gave the franchise an opportunity to prove it can handle not only the spectacle of kaiju, but address how their very existence can reshape society.

With Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire 's box office success and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters ' season 2 renewal , the Monsterverse's future seems incredibly bright. Despite debate surrounding how it handles the monsters, the franchise clearly has enough of an appeal that audiences are invested in what happens next. Furthermore, with Kojima giving his seal of approval, those who missed out on the movie may be convinced to give the feature a chance.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is currently playing in theaters.

Source: @HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN /Twitter

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

After nearly destroying each other in 2021's Godzilla vs. Kong, the giant Titans are back to face a new dangerous threat, but this time, they are on the same side. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is the fifth film in Warner Bros.' growing Monsterverse franchise and will be directed by Adam Wingard.

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘Empire of Light’ celebrates the power of film to heal lost souls

Olivia colman delivers a delicate yet ferocious performance at the heart of sam mendes’s tender and tear-soaked valentine to cinema.

Olivia Colman delivers an alternately delicate and ferocious performance as a cinema manager in “Empire of Light,” a tender, tear-soaked valentine to the ineffable joys of moviegoing.

Colman plays Hilary, a quiet, rather dowdy woman living in an unnamed seaside town in England in the 1980s. As “Empire of Light” opens, we meet one of her most beguiling co-stars: the Empire Cinema, a faded but vibrant art deco movie palace whose marquee during this Christmas season is advertising “The Blues Brothers” and “All That Jazz.” We meet the staff as they compare notes about eccentric customers and the worst thing they ever found as they cleaned up after the last show. Eventually, Hilary’s boss, Mr. Ellis — played with characteristic diffidence by Colin Firth — arrives, stiffly giving her a box of candy “with deep affection.”

Here are the movies everyone will be talking about this holiday season

Just how deep becomes disquietingly clear in scenes to come; written and directed by Sam Mendes, “Empire of Light” doles out its information carefully and discreetly, as the contours of Hilary’s life make themselves known. There’s a tightly coiled sense of control at the center of her studied equanimity. When a newcomer joins the staff — an attractive, exuberant younger man named Stephen, portrayed with a disarming lack of guile by newcomer Micheal Ward — Hilary’s world expands, but her growing happiness also threatens to tip over into something more dangerous and increasingly terrifying.

The sleepy, small-town rhythms of “Empire of Light” are given pace and momentum by Mr. Ellis’s news that the Empire will play host to a genuine red-carpet premiere, of a new movie called “Chariots of Fire.” Thus is the film’s climax set in motion, except that it turns out to be something of a misdirect. Filmed by Roger Deakins in exquisite hues of gold and amber, and accompanied by an equally sensitive score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, “Empire of Light” is commendable not for its plot but for its collection of (mostly) sympathetic characters — not just Hilary and Stephen, who pursue an interracial friendship against the backdrop of Thatcher-era skinhead thuggery — but the Empire’s eclectic staff: the punk-tough usher Janine (Hannah Onslow), the observant junior manager Neil (Tom Brooke), and Norman (Toby Jones), the theater’s fastidious projectionist who carries film canisters as if he’s bearing the holy elements.

“Empire of Light” turns out to be the second movie this season in which a character delivers a tutorial on the concept of persistence of vision — the trick of the eye that allows movies to work their magic, whereby a series of single frames is perceived to be one continuous image. In Steven Spielberg’s “ The Fabelmans ,” that speech was meant to show the audience how the artist as a young man became fascinated not just by the mechanics of film but by its manipulative effect on the audience.

For Mendes, such disquisitions aren’t as self-congratulatory; rather, he has made a movie dedicated to the modest proposition that it takes viewers — not heroic auteurs — to create a film, or at least complete its expressive circuit. Colman dominates the film’s most dramatically vivid scenes, when Hilary reaches the end of the many ropes she’s been gripping so tightly. But the most upsetting sequence might be one in which a “scooter riot” of the aforementioned fascist hooligans comes dangerously close to destroying the grandeur of the Empire’s magnificent lobby, as if insurrectionists were attacking a citadel of civility itself.

“Empire of Light” occasionally overplays its sentiment — a subplot involving an injured bird feels manufactured and contrived. But it’s a soothingly beautiful film — visually pleasing, emotionally rich, and authentically touching when it comes to Hilary and Stephen’s evolving relationship. (A shot early in the film, in which Hilary tends to the box office alone, exudes a Hopper-esque tone of elegiac solitude.) Mendes pays homage to the films of his youth by way of the films that play as a way to mark time: “Stir Crazy” here, “Raging Bull” there; but his ode to the medium he loves goes even deeper, not just to its power to generate empathy, but to its pluralism. In “Empire of Light,” the theater is a great democratizer: a convener for misfits, loners and dreamers of every stripe. With this bittersweet gem of a film, Mendes has given spectators a modest but profound gift: the reminder that, at their best, movies offer us not just a refuge, but a way to join the thrum of life, in all its pain and ungovernable glory.

R. At area theaters. Contains sexuality, strong language and brief violence. 119 minutes.

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Empire of Light review – Sam Mendes’s sprawling love letter to cinema

Despite the best efforts of Olivia Colman and cinematographer Roger Deakins, the director’s first solo writing effort is uneven

T here are plenty of themes swimming around in Sam Mendes’s sprawling, uneven Empire of Light , but few coherent ideas linking them. Set in the 1980s, in the kind of pursed-lipped and sanctimonious British seaside town that wears its former glory like a long outdated party frock, the film awkwardly slings together mental health issues and racially motivated violence, then ties it up with a rather glib point about the unifying power of cinema.

Olivia Colman plays Hilary, a troubled front-of-house manager at a seafront picture palace, who forms a romantic bond with a much younger employee (Micheal Ward). Colman is a phenomenal talent and Ward shows potential, but even so, the relationship between them struggles to convince as anything more than a plot device. This is the first film that Mendes has directed from his own screenplay (he had a co-writing credit on 1917 ), and for all its visual flair, courtesy of veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins , there’s little to suggest that Mendes has the writing chops to match his directing skill.

In cinemas from 9 January

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Empire of Light Is an Exquisite Story of People in Flux

By Richard Lawson

After all the annihilation of his war film, 1917 , director Sam Mendes has traveled forward in time, to the troubled early 1980s in England, to tell a humble little tale of human connection. His new film, Empire of Light , is the director’s most delicate, a wistful short story about two people seized by circumstance who help one another find their way through life. It’s an achingly lovely film—the best Mendes has yet made.

Olivia Colman plays Hilary, a retiring singleton who works at a seaside movie palace in small-town coastal England. 1980 is drawing to a close, and a Christmas melancholy fills the air. We watch as Hilary goes about her lonely life, dinners for one and the occasional utilitarian tryst with her married boss, Mr. Ellis ( Colin Firth ). Something is stirring, though, all of this stasis seeming pregnant with anticipation. That feeling is beautifully rendered in the film’s score, moody dots of piano and ambient hum—the sound of the planet in motion—composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross .

That quiet excitement and nervousness is answered, in part, by the arrival of a new theater employee, Stephen ( Michael Ward ), a young man spinning his wheels until he gets into college. Hilary is instantly beguiled. He radiates kindness that wins over the whole staff, but Hilary senses something particularly kindred in him. Both she and Stephen are isolated in this picturesque but chilly town: he because he is Black in a bigoted country, she because of her struggles with mental health, which are gradually revealed as Hilary and Stephen fall into a tenuous romance.

One tenses up when it seems that Empire of Light is headed into the smarmy, didactic territory of a lesson movie. We expect some creaky panacea about race relations, and some stale, issue-of-the-week lecturing about mental health. But Mendes, who wrote the script, skirts hoary cliche (and worse) by staying close to Stephen and Hilary, these portraits of people in flux so finely wrought by Colman and Ward.

Sure, Empire of Light has more than just this one relationship on its mind. The film is a coming-of-age story universal in its consideration of the charged and formative encounters of youth. It’s a gentle encouragement out of the resigned slump of middle age. And it’s a drama about the nasty resurgence of racist nationalism that gripped England at the dawn of Thatcher’s era, and has now surged once again. But those themes don’t overwhelm the soft-spoken thing that Mendes and his actors have built. Empire of Light finds a careful balance—it listens to its characters rather than shouting a message over them.

Also important for a Sam Mendes movie, Empire of Light ’s exquisite aesthetics don’t vainly upstage the story. The film looks incredible, with sumptuous cinematography by Roger Deakins and richly textured production design by Mark Tildesley . Those visual graces support and enhance the story rather than drown it out; the same cannot be said of all past Mendes endeavors.

I’m curious where this film came from. After a festival season of big-director memoir pieces, one does wonder if some personal narrative is being retold here. The film doesn’t gesture toward its creator in any easily discernible way, though, so I suppose we should take it on its stated terms. Whatever Mendes’s connection to the material, he’s made something humane and nourishing, a picture of rare thoughtfulness and decency. Viewed from some angles, the film looks rather strange: as Hilary loses her grip on her well being, Empire of Light takes on surprising new dimensions. It’s a shock to see the movie break its dreamy spell, as Colman suddenly turns the volume of her performance way up. Mendes’s calm and steady film stays upright throughout these jarring thrashes—and as Stephen is violently thrashed at—building toward a conclusion of staggering poignance.

Empire of Light ’s overarching sentiment is hopeful, but not blinkered. Stephen is heading off into an uncertain future, burdened by other people’s prejudice as he tries to stretch into the fullness of himself. Mendes offers no balm for that, but at least gives Stephen these valuable moments of communion with troubled, yearning Hilary. In that, these characters escape the miserablism of so much prestige cinema. They’re given simple and profound pleasures to both ease and complicate their pain. Empire of Light could be unfairly read as maudlin (and already has been during its festival run), and it does indeed come close to that line. But Mendes restrains the film before its high feeling—its fugues of poetry, its watery smiles in the face of such sadness—becomes cloying.

What remains is a deep and refreshingly heart-on-its-sleeve compassion, a humbled and awed appreciation for the majesty of learning from another person. In the film, Hilary shows Stephen the theater’s abandoned third floor, once a grand ballroom full of noise and activity now gone silent and used only by pigeons. Seeing this ghostly room, one assumes that, later on in the film, it will be somehow revived. But Mendes lets it stay lost, an emblem of irretrievable time. Still, Hilary and Stephen make it their own for a while, a secret place where anything seems possible as their lives so fleetingly intersect. And then, just past them: the windows, the beach, the sea, the world entire—briefly theirs.

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Home » Reviews » Telugu Movie Reviews

Razakar: The Silent Genocide Of Hyderabad Movie Review: No Holds-Barred Expose Of Masked History

This is a shocking expose of a gruesome reality behind a politically-motivated distortion of history, around the time of indian independence..

Star Cast: Bobby Simha, Tej Sapru, Makrand Deshpande, Raj Arjun, Annusriya Tripathi, Vedhika, Anasuya Bharadwaj, Thalaivasal Vijay, John Vijay

Director: Yata Satyanarayana

What’s Good: Tells us in a no-holds-barred manner about the way Hindus were tortured by a megalomaniac in the name of Islam. The film also has fabulous performances by Raj Arjun in particular as well as by Tej Sapru and Makrand Deshpande

What’s Bad: An avoidable ‘filmi’ touch merely to add masala entertainment elements, especially in the conception of songs and some clearly implausible stunts by the ‘good’ forces.

Loo Break: Not really

Watch or Not?: Yes, if you are a devotee of truth

Language: Telugu with Hindi dubbing

Available On: Theatrical release

Runtime: 166 Minutes

The real story is set around the time India got her Independence and some princely states had to be integrated into India. The Nizam then, Mir Osman Ali Khan ( Makrand Deshpande ) refuses to do so, preferring to keep Hyderabad intact and make it an Islamic state of his dreams. His militant and despotic lieutenant and general advisor, Kasim Rizvi (Raj Arjun), unleashes a frenzy of torture, brutality, murder, rape and conversions in different parts of the state against Hindus and against Marathi, Telugu, Kannada and Hindi as languages being taught—a genocide that few Indians today are even aware about.

As Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru keeps prevaricating, intoning about a treaty India has signed, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the original Iron Man of India and the Home Minister then, decides to take stringent action even as the Nizam plans to ally with Pakistan and other Islamic nations.

Razakar: The Silent Genocide of Hyderabad Movie Review: Script Analysis

While the original Telugu script does not beat about the bush and shows the extreme levels of inhuman brutality shown by the militant ‘police’ (the Razakar), the Hindi lines also do complete justice to the saga of unbridled despotism out of religious fanaticism. Footage of sadism, unspeakable horrors and mayhem resorted to by the Razakar, again and again, take up most of the film’s long length while an ageing Nizam struggles to retain his royal status out of a misguided sense of power and authority.

The dialogues are chilling, and so are the situations. And the non-fanatic and righteously secular (a term not employed then!!) and nationalistic Muslims are also given the same treatment as the helpless and hapless Hindu folks by these fanatical forces.

Razakar: The Silent Genocide of Hyderabad Movie Review: Star Performance

If there is one actor who dazzles here, it is Raj Arjun, a man who played the evil stepfather in Secret Superstar with the same ease and aplomb as his portrayal of Shirdi Sai Baba in the web series we saw some years ago. As Rizvi, he comes across as so malevolent and tyrannical that this must be one of the most horrendous of the real-life villains we have seen so far in Hindi cinema. I can only salute him for his expressions, the way he rages, roars and otherwise modulates his voice. And his expressions and the manic look in his eyes in close-ups are simply out of this world.

Tej Sapru is excellent as the determined Sardar Patel in a performance that is as much subdued as it is intense. Makrand Deshpande brings to life the erring Nizam, who sees the light too late but cannot be punished for the genocide he sanctioned. The character of K.M. Munshi, popularly known by his pen name Ghanshyam Vyas, an Indian independence movement activist, politician and writer from Gujarat and the founder of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, is evocatively brought out by veteran South actor Thalaivasal Vijay.

As the film is so stark and graphic about everything, the characters are all perfect for the parts, and among them, Annusriya Tripathi as one of Mir Osman Ali Khan’s wives, Vedhika as Shanthavva and Bobby Simha as Rajireddy stand out. The issue here is that all have got limited to even less (!) footage, but they all still shine in the roles given.

Razakar: The Silent Genocide of Hyderabad Movie Review: Direction, Music

Director Yata Satyanarayana goes all out in his passionate zeal to expose (as in The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story and Bastar: A Naxal Story) truths hidden from all or most of the nation out of vested interests. A present Censor rule is that whatever is depicted on screen must be backed by documented facts, and clearly the depiction must be authenticated. It is horrifying how the Indian powers then distorted even relatively contemporary history out of pure malicious intent.

The film is very candid in its exhibition of reality, and while the gore may put off a section of the audience (word-of-mouth is always vital for a film’s box-office standing), I must congratulate the director, who has also co-written the script, for showing things as they were.

That said, mention must be made of the needless dramatization that elongates the film, so to speak. The dance invoking the Goddess Durga and another rousing song not only slow down the pace but also seem clearly inspired by S.S. Rajamouli! One song, contextually, is very similar to the classic Kumuram Bheemodu from RRR! The background score is also an inspiration, as are the end-credits. Then there are some action sequences akin to normal films in which the lead actors take on multiple antagonists all at once! The director should have steered clear of such needless add-ons to a terrifying saga, which, unlike the fictional RRR or the Bahubali franchise, is totally real.

The music per se is alright, ditto the fitted Hindi lyrics.

Razakar: The Silent Genocide of Hyderabad Movie Review: The Last Word

Such films, sadly, in our country, are labelled as ‘propaganda’ films, even more so as the election season is on. But the truth will always be the truth, and in any case, films always work because of their resonance with the viewer.

Three and a half stars!

Razakar: The Silent Genocide of Hyderabad Trailer

Razakar: The Silent Genocide of Hyderabad released on 26th April 2024.

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For more recommendations, read our Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Movie Review here .

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The author of this review himself gave away the purpose of this film. No matter what, it’s crystal clear that this is a propaganda movie releasing in the midst of elections and with ulterior motives. This movie is a fiction of BJP minded sadists imagination. Even if it was 1% true, it would have been highlighted a 1000 times by BJP in it’s 10 years rule.

Lol…so if Muslims are shown as Evil then its propoganda and if they shown as victims then its true. Doesn’t matter we will watch the movie and help BJP.

Bro, how is history a propaganda? Looking st your name I can understand that thus might be hard for you to digest.. but it’s history not myth.

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I tried Alix Earle’s viral Amazon selfie light, and it’s totally worth the hype

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If you’ve ever wondered how TikTok “It” girl Alix Earle looks so flawless in every post, allow this affordable Amazon find to shed some (literal) light on her selfie secrets.

The “Get Ready With Me” queen first shouted out her go-to Newmowa phone light in a Dec. 2022 TikTok , raving, “I use it for almost all my Instagram photos. Taking photos, or making TikTok videos — you need this.”

The nifty clip-on tool swiftly sold out — but the tech brand’s since restocked, and while it’s still featured as a “content creation must-have” on Earle’s Amazon storefront to this day, it’s blessedly easier to buy.

Newmowa 60 LED Phone Light

It’s not just Earle who’s obsessed with the gadget, either; it’s racked up over 8,800 five-star reviews on Amazon to date, with satisfied shoppers praising it as a “game changer,” “worth every penny” and “easy to use.”

As an elder millennial who doesn’t spend all that much time scrolling TikTok but loves creating content on Instagram, I’ll admit that I didn’t clock Earle’s initial endorsement of the Newmowa light, and thus missed the initial wave of hype.

I’d also always consciously avoided taking photos and videos after sunset or in dimly lit indoor spaces, knowing the final results never looked as good as those taken in broad daylight.

But after my friend Loanne, a social media manager, whipped out her “Alix Earle light” during a trip to Miami and snapped some late-night photos on our hotel balcony, I was sold (or, as the kids today say, #influenced). They looked downright professional!

I ordered my own Newmowa light on the spot, and decided to put the tool to the test at my birthday party in a darkened cocktail bar.

While it may have raised a few eyebrows of those at my table every time I switched it on (no shame in my content-creation game!), the photos speak for themselves.

Even my husband and sister, both of whom tend to avoid Instagram like the plague, were impressed by the snaps.

Essentially a ring light you can take on the go, the tool’s powered by 60 LED lighting beads and offers three different light modes: bright white, warm yellow and a combination of the two.

On top of that, there are 10 (yes, 10 ) brightness levels from which to choose; dial yours all the way up, and I swear you could capture a stunning selfie in a pitch-black basement. (Not that you’d necessarily want to, but it’s nice to have the option, no?)

It also ships with two kinds of clips: a front one that can be adjusted 90 degrees, and a back one that you can slide your phone into for rear-camera shooting.

And since the light’s built-in battery is made to last for 135 minutes of continuous use, you will need to charge it occasionally — but it comes with a USB cable that you can plug into any wall outlet or compatible port.

The bottom line

Ever since I purchased my Earle-approved light, it’s become my constant content-creation companion; when I head to an evening event or dinner where I know I’ll want to document my outfit, the food, the ambiance or all of the above, I just slip it into my purse before leaving the house.

And at under $35, I’d say this instant glow-up is well worth the price.

• Clips easily onto a phone, laptop or tablet
• Three light modes and 10 brightness levels
• Lightweight and portable
• 135-minute battery requires intermittent charging, but device ships with the cord needed to do so

How we tested

After ordering my Newmowa light, I used it to capture both photo and video content in several places with less-than-optimal lighting — including bars, restaurants and my own apartment — using both the front and rear cameras on my iPhone. Throughout it all, I prioritized the following points:

• Lighting: Obviously, this was the biggie. Could this tool really take my indoor and nighttime shots from dark and depressing to bright and beautiful?
• Ease of use: Is the gadget portable, lightweight and simple to clip onto the front or back of a phone?
• Value: While some high-end ring lights will set you back hundreds, I’ve also noticed plenty of TikTokers (not to mention Amazon) hawking similar phone lights for under $10. As this one falls somewhere in between, is it worth the price?

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