Annual Top Films Lists

Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2022: #66. Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light

Published on January 9, 2022

Empire of Light

Slightly “downgrading” in budget and no necessarily “scope,” Sam Mendes‘ tenth outing (backed by Searchlight) will employ Olivia Colman, Michael Ward, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Crystal Clarke and Tanya Moodie in the era of materialism, consumerism, and crap blockbuster movies. What’s noteworthy here is that Empire of Light will count as Mendes’ first solo screen cred.

Gist: This is a love story set in and around a beautiful old cinema on the South Coast of England in the 1980s.

Release Date/Prediction: Venice Film Festival, Telluride, TIFF, NYFF and BFI London Film Festival are all in the cards if this film is completed on time.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).