This has thus far been a fall festival season of disappointments. One of the prime letdowns has got to be Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light,” which I’ll be watching next week at TIFF.
“Empire of Light” currently has a 58 on Metacritic and 70% on Rotten Tomatoes. I keep hearing the reception at Telluride was “warmly polite”. You can bet pundits will try to push this one all season long. Folks like Jeffrey Wells, Sasha Stone, Pete Hammond, Scott Feinberg and Clayton Davis are praising “Empire of Light”, but critics? They have their fangs out for Mendes.
We can theorize that in the past, critically-maligned films like “The Blind Side” (53 MC Score), “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” (46) and “Bohemian Rhapsody” (49) still managed to receive Best Picture nominations. Nothing is impossible. We shouldn’t completely discount Mendes’ film from the Oscar race.
The film will now screen at TIFF. It should be warmly received there, like all movies that play that festival. Based on the reviews, Olivia Colman could still get that Oscar nomination, but the film itself? I’ll weigh in on that when I see it next week.
Mendes is a competent filmmaker who has, for the most part, avoided this kind of critical bashing in his 23 year filmmaking career. The sole exceptions being “Away We Go,” “Jarhead” and “Spectre.”