Empire of Light (2022)

This is the year for directors to look back on the things that influenced them in thier youth, it seems, and this is Sam Mendes's contribution to that genre. The story is set in the fall and winter of 1980-81 in the seaside town of Margate, Kent, around a palatial two-screen Art Deco theater that shows films that were new back then, and when films were actually on film that played on reels. They were also movies that fed the imagination of young Mendes, who based parts of the script on his youth. The homage to what was then is on display. There's a projectionist who demonstrates how a projector works and talks about the persistence of vision and how light can shut out darkness. Various characters keep urging the heroine, the lonely, workaholic duty manager Hilary Small (Olivia Colman), to go sit in an auditorium once in a while, and let cinema transport her away from her miseries--which doesn't actually work it turns out. The plot follows a then taboo affair between Hilary, who is sexually harassed at work and alone at home and the new hire Stephen, who is black and harassed. The plot doesn't quite hold together, but close enough, and the cinematography is brilliant, enough so that I was transported by the beauty of it.