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EMPIRE OF THE SUN

  • Dir. Steven Spielberg
  • USA
  • 1987
  • 153 min.
  • PG
  • 4K DCP
  • Assistive Listening
  • Hearing Loop
EMPIRE OF THE SUN

Part of The Fabelmans +6.

Steven Spielberg directs a young Christian Bale in a stunning debut as Jim, a British expatriate who’s separated from his parents when the Japanese army invades Shanghai at the outset of World War II. With the help of an American soldier-of-fortune (John Malkovich), Jim learns to survive his new life in a prison camp as the tidings of war grow ominous for the Japanese.

“A superb movie, at once colossal and radiantly personal… A large and superbly orchestrated movie, visualized with the magnitude and majesty of a David Lean film. Spielberg weaves this epic tapestry with grace and precision, threading throughout his own indelibly optimistic signature, spelled, of course, through the clear eyes of a wise and impressionable child.” —Duane Byrge, Hollywood Reporter

“Though [it] is Spielberg’s most ambitious work, and his most complex psychologically, it grows out of his early films, which all felt like boys’ dreams of adventure blown up to gigantic proportions…But what a prodigious visual imagination! EMPIRE OF THE SUN is a great, overwrought movie that leaves one wordless” —David Denby, New York Magazine

The Belcourt Theatre does not provide advisories about subject matter or potential triggering content, as sensitivities vary from person to person.

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