Empire Of Light review: A tender celebration of cinema starring two national treasures-Larushka Ivan-Zadeh-Entertainment – Metro

Michael Ward and Olivia Colman star in Sam Mendes’s latest film (Picture: Searchlight Pictures)

Starring a double helping of national treasures and written and directed by Sam Mendes, this is a heart-warming love letter to cinema, wherein a misfit bunch of employees pull together to revive the fortunes of a fading art deco picture palace. Yet Empire Of Light is not quite the cosy, popcorn and slippers-fest you’d expect.

It’s 1981. Hilary (Olivia Colman) is the depressed duty manager of The Empire, a vast under-populated cinema on Margate seafront. Her boss is played by Colin Firth, with whom Hilary’s having a secret, surprisingly raunchy, affair.

Into this twilight world stumbles Stephen (Micheal Ward), a young, black, wannabe architect who sparks an unlikely attraction with Hilary. Both are outsiders.

Hilary is wrestling with an illness that Stephen only slowly begins to recognise, while Stephen is forced to endure a daily battering of racial prejudice that soon takes an alarming turn.

Tender in the most unexpected places, it’s a film that can’t be neatly pigeon-holed. And while Colman’s performance seizes the spotlight, Ward creates a warmth and depth from sketchier material.

Toby Jones (left) plays the cinema’s projectionist (Picture: Searchlight Pictures)

The film centres round a misfit bunch of employees who help to revive a fading art deco cinema (Picture: Searchlight Pictures)

In between them, Toby Jones’s projectionist pops up to rhapsodise about the magic of celluloid, which ‘creates an illusion of motion, an illusion of life, so you don’t see the darkness. You just see a beam of light.’

You just don’t get that same tingle at home with a flat-screen TV, do you?

The verdict

Fall back in love with cinema-going with this choice bit of Bafta-bait.

Empire Of Light (15) is out now in cinemas

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