Empire of Light

2022

119 mins

Directed by Sam Mendes
45%
74%
Drama
Romance

Academy Award-winning director Sam Mendes (1917) casts fellow Oscar-winners Olivia Colman (The Favourite) and Colin Firth (The King's Speech) in this love story set... More

Academy Award-winning director Sam Mendes (1917) casts fellow Oscar-winners Olivia Colman (The Favourite) and Colin Firth (The King's Speech) in this love story set in and around a beautiful old cinema on the South Coast of England in the 1980s.

Set in and around a faded old cinema in an English coastal town in the early 1980s, it follows Hilary (Colman) a cinema manager struggling with her mental health, and Stephen (Micheal Ward, Top Boy), a new employee who longs to escape this provincial town in which he faces daily adversity. Both Hilary and Stephen find a sense of belonging through their unlikely and tender relationship and come to experience the healing power of music, cinema, and community.

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Where to watch Empire of Light

Empire of Light is available to stream in the United... More Kingdom now on Amazon Video and Disney+ and Apple TV Store and Google TV and YouTube and Microsoft.

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Empire of Light | Ratings & Reviews

45_%258 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes® rating
74_%89 reviews
Audience score rating

"Empire of Light is a sweet, heartfelt, humane movie... It’s clearly a labour of love for Sam Mendes: love requited."

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The Guardian

"This is a beautifully made film. The problem is that it’s hollow. Underneath all that beauty is very little."

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RogerEbert.com

"A nicely acted misfire from director Sam Mendes..."

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Los Angeles Times

"Scattershot and moribund..."

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IndieWire

"Sweet if sometimes hokey..."

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The Times

"Colman, a warm and goofy actress... (with a) gift for powerhouse emoting, goes further into roaring-virtuoso mode than the material can bear."

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Little White Lies

"The film has a sheepish, hair-shirt quality, as if it wants credit for intersectional largesse."

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The Telegraph

"Mendes’s best film yet..."

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Vanity Fair

"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."

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