Sam Mendes’ new drama adds Colin Firth and Olivia Colman.

I have seen Empire of Light twice—on Monday night and then again on Tuesday night, since Tuesday was the last day that it showed in my city. (The film reached one theater in my city, and for all of four-and-a-half-days.) I appreciated it very much the first time ("very good"), and I loved it even more the second. Indeed, along with The Outfit and The Banshees of Inisherin, I would consider Empire of Light one of the three "great" films from 2022 that I have viewed thus far. I liked Sam Mandes' 1917 quite a bit ("good/very good"), but this film is really much better. Mendes' writing and directing are both superb, and he elicits excellent performances from his cast, not just from Olivia Colman and Colin Firth, but also Micheal Ward as the young male lead ("Stephen") and a host of supporting players, including Tanya Moodie as Stephen's Senegalese mother. 

Empire of Light serves as a brilliant metaphor illuminating the relationship between movies and life. It does so unpretentiously, and the visual style is impressive yet also unpretentious. Indeed, whereas Mendes' visual manner in 1917 sometimes called too much attention to itself, here he is pitch-perfect, and one might say that everything about this film is pitch-perfect. It seamlessly blends comedy and tragedy while ultimately transcending both categories. The editing is fluid yet patient, the running length just right, the film totally realistic in tone yet subtly—even latently—dreamy, playing rather like a memory, or a movie. Whereas The Fablemans is a film about a young filmmaker, Empire of Light is about the experience of going to the movies, working at a movie theater, and what movies mean relative to life and the life of the mind—and all done, again, with earnestness and humility and without a hint of self-importance or pretentiousness. It is also a film about race and patriarchy and misogyny and community—large and small—and mismatched people, misfits, taboos. 

The dialogue is simple yet elegant, the literary sources and diegetic musical choices outstanding, the subtle piano score used judiciously and effectively. The cinematography is luminous yet never grandiose, with beautiful contrasts that nonetheless are not overly sharp or too stylized for the material and the tone. Empire of Light mixes still shots and graceful, gliding camera movements (one brief, subjective tracking shot is especially memorable while remaining perfectly integrated into the overall visual style), with ample reverse-angle coverage and a great feel for medium-range shots, which can constitute a lost art in contemporary cinema. Again, Mendes suggests how a realistic experience can nonetheless seem surreal, and he does so with tremendous subtlety, with no stylistic hysteria or needless exposition. 

The Fablemans is a "good" film (in large part) about the love of cinema, and because Steven Spielberg is its director, it received Golden Globe nominations for Best Picture and Best Director and Best Original Score, whereas Empire of Light received nothing aside from a Best Actress nomination for Colman (Michelle Williams also garnered a nomination, deservedly, for The Fablemans). The same pattern may hold with the Oscars. But whereas The Fablemans hints at poignancy and pathos and fatalism or destiny, Empire of Light actually achieves those qualities and does so with quiet transcendence. It is a powerful movie with the grace of a floating feather.