“Empire of Light”
Address sam mendes
interpreters Olivia Colman, Michael Ward, Colin Firth, Toby Jones
Year 2022
premiere March 31, 2023
★★★
scene after scene “Empire of Light”new Sam MendesOlivia Colman demonstrates an extraordinary ability to spontaneously switch between indifference, enthusiasm, and anger, and the cinematographer Roger Deakins dazzles with a series of open plans that highlight the loneliness of the characters and the emptiness that surrounds them. They are love, mental illness, racism and the healing power of cinematoo decentralized to draw its thematic lines together, and too schematic to win our emotional engagement.
Set in an English seaside town in the early 1980s, the film is about a corrupt movie theater. a mature white woman and a young black man those who find shelter from each other from the institutionalized sexism that bothers them and the harassment they suffer because of their skin color. If their relationship doesn’t reflect the drama for which it was intended, it’s because instead of people of flesh and blood, it’s because they feel like they’re just stray ideas, tools Mendes uses to find tears inside us while addressing a few important issues. before sweeping them a pompous defense of cinema and areas designed for it. “Empire of Light” claims that any movie has the magical ability to transform us, but at the same time, because of its existence, refutes that statement.