Empire of Light

This kind of shameless exploitation of audience’s soft spot for cinema is beginning to get on my nerves. The script feels like it’s written by AI with the input of Oscar winning keywords.

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While "Empire of Light" has its heart in the right place and features some standout performances and stunning visuals, it ultimately falls short due to its scattered narrative and underdeveloped themes. Nonetheless, it's worth a watch for its heartfelt portrayal of the magic of movie theaters and the people who work there.

Hits that quintessential Oscar-bait sweet-spot of being clumsy, dull, handsome, and sporadically unpleasant.

I thought it was charming and handled it's heavier themes well. It does feel more like a sequence of events which then stops, which has hurt it's score.

Ultimately unremarkable, and rather sad.

You remove the score and the cinematography and all you get left is a 2022 version of a 90s Oscar bait film. It just shouldn't be so dire with a cast like that.

Does feel artificial, and sometimes just pours stuff at you randomly, lose end style, but it also touches mildly on a lot of the right notes. Just not hard enough to overshadow it's shortcomings.

Too many stories and simply just too dull.

It mostly works but the script isn't as unified as it needs to be.

This is a film centering on social commentary of the time its set in, the early 1980s. I thought it was meant to be like a British Cinema Paradiso and in a way it sort of is but it more focusses on the grimmer sides of British life affecting the various cinema employees, than it does (i.e. focusses) on the technical and emotional aspects of film playing itself. It does have some quite poignant moments and colour is quite bright and central to the film, which I liked.

Sam Mendes'den Sinema aşkı. 90 lı yıllara geri döndüm. Süreyya ve Reks Sinemaları. Neyse. Sinema çalışanı Olivia Colman, yeni gelen genç oğlana aşık olur. Bu arada, müdür ile cinsel ilişkisini vardır. Olivia Colman harika manik depresif rolü ve Sinematografi şahane. Fakat kurgu da sıkıntı var. Çok ağır 1 tempo seçmiş. Sam Mendes'e göre değil. Ama tabloluk sahneler var. Nefis. Filmin sonunda, Ağaçlar. Sadece erkekleri dinleyecek değiliz.

A clunky but earnest package of Big Issues including racism, romance, mental health, and the life-changing power of cinema. Sam Mendes wouldn't be my first choice to tackle some of these things, but his nostalgia is generally more clear-eyed than sentimental--he thankfully stops short of prescribing cinema as the cure to Thatcherism. And Olivia Colman is doin' work holding it all together.

"Ağaçlar yapraklanıyor - Dilimin ucundaki kelimeler gibi - Taze filizler sakince yayılıyor - Yeşermeleri bir nevi keder işareti - Yoksa onlar yeniden doğarken biz yaşlanıyor muyuz? - Hayır, aslında onlar da ölüyor - Sözüm ona her yıl taze görünürler - Ama gerçek, halkalarında gizli - Yine de dinlenmek bilmeyen bu kaleler - Her mayıs yeniden dallanıp budaklanırlar - Geçen yıl öldü, derler sanki - Başla her şeye yeniden - Yeniden - Yeniden" Philip Larkin - Ağaçlar

Flawed but never less than a galvanising, hypnotic experience thanks to Deakins’ beautifully seductive cinematography, and what may be Colman’s finest performance to date; her Hilary is unforgettable, taking us on an incredible journey from high to low while always making her character’s complex through-line believable and credible. It is a shame Mendes' screenplay lets the film down, becoming far too ambitious and grappling with social issues it has neither the time or inclination to pursue.

Empire of Light is an extremely beautiful, but also extremely flawed movie. Roger Deakins delivers his usually gorgeous cinematography. Reznor and Ross turn in an absolutely beautiful score. Colman and Ward are terrific as the leads. The thing that stops me from loving this movie though, is that Sam Mendes' screenplay can get rather unwieldy at times. When he tries to go big and talk about mental health or racism all subtlety is completely lost.

First act didn't work for me, but it took off eventually. Colman is again phenomenal.

This really resonated with me, as both someone who was finding their feet in the early eighties and having worked in a cinema in recent years. It’s a bitter sweet tale, beautifully photographed with a convincing cast-but the love story itself wasn’t that convincing

What the film really has going for it is great performances from Colman and Ward (and a really great turn from Colin Firth as their loathsome boss) and astonishing cinematography from Roger Deakins. Deakins' work in particular is gorgeous without being showy and is worth the price of admission alone.

For a cinematic analogy, I'd say the projectionist needed to adjust the focus on the lens for the audience to actually enjoy this unfocused light show.

i'm not sure what this film is supposed to be. it's a tearjerker classical-hollywood-style story filmed as if it's a festival film. affectually stunned plotlines rehash cliches while vapid characters simply do not work to amplify the *human connection* angle of the script. the sequence where we're supposed to celebrate the magic of cinema is completely unearned. mendes may be a brilliant craftsman but sometimes that isn't enough (and imagine you can't even make use of deakins!!!).

Mendes stages the film’s big moments as if he were still shooting 1917 and Empire of Light’s initially intimate, small-scale story starts to feel dwarfed by its director’s elephantine stylistic choices. Some obvious storytelling choices don’t help, either. Though she works in a theater, Hilary never takes time to watch movies herself, and if you can’t guess the payoff to that detail, you’ve probably never seen a movie yourself, either.

The leads give strong performances, Colman as a troubled woman and Ward as the young Black man who remains resilient during a time of social unrest. Mendes's script is too on the nose about each of its themes -- mental illness, racism, nostalgia for the cinema. It hits the dramatic/romantic beats that you expect it to, so they get tiresome during its two hour runtime. The "love letter to cinema" aspect is about as deep as Nicole Kidman's notorious AMC ad. Deakins's talent is wasted on this.