Popular reviews

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★½ 6

  Young Christan Bale looks exactly like old Christian Bale and it's freaking me out.

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  Review by James (Schaffrillas) ★★★

  Kind of feels like the exact middle ground between overly whimsical and sentimental Spielberg, and "director of Schindler's List" Spielberg. He's getting to the point where he can effectively direct a powerful drama, just give him time.

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  Review by Silent J ★★★½ 2

  Wow, Batman was tiny.

  It's freaky just looking at him.

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  Review by Cavy van Wyk ★★★ 1

  Christian Bale has been carrying movies since the age of 13.

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  Review by cinemacl🎃wn ★★★ 13

  For a film that brims with such a strong passion for flying, it's ironic that Empire of the Sun doesn't even manage to take off at any given point over the course of its runtime. Quite a chore to sit through, this coming-of-age war drama from Steven Spielberg is completely devoid of his usual flair, remains monotonous in tone from start to finish, and is rather unsure of what it wants to be.

  Based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, the story takes place during the Second World War in China and concerns an English kid who, after getting separated from his parents during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, ends up in an internment camp where he learns…

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★½

  There’s an odd strain of whimsy in the second part of this (which is set in a prison camp, of all places) that doesn’t really match the brutality of the first half, or the story as a whole. The sequences before that in Shanghai prior to the war, and then Jamie wandering through his abandoned neighborhood, contain some of Spielberg’s most haunting imagery. (The scene where Jamie pieces together what happened to his family based on hand and footprints left in powdered makeup that spilled on the floor... incredible.) Throw in maybe the single greatest performance by a child actor ever and you have an imperfect but underrated film.

  Speaking of the child actor, it was some kid named Christian Bale? I wonder what happened to guy. Seems like he had a lot of potential!

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  Review by Haroon Paul ★★★★

  Someone needs to study this strange case of Christian Bale. How did he pull this off at such a young age? Steven Spielberg×Christian Bale was the combo I was missing in my life and tonight that emptiness vanishes as well.

  Spielberg creates a fallen empire and the king of this empire is a kid with great manners and even greater ambitions, even though he slaps a Japanese soldier in order to show him the right route.

  There is cruelty of war on full display, and the horrors of it are revealed slowly. It becomes a tale of survival and courage and the said empire is formed from scraps. Shanghai starts off as a vibrant city full of colors and ends…

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  Review by Wood ★★★

  Even when Christian Bale was 13 he looked like a perpetual 40 year old man.

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  Review by russman ★★★ 1

  This isn't how I remembered Batman's origin story

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  Review by chavel ★★★★½ 7

  Empire of the Sun is among Steven Spielberg’s most majestic, harkening euphoria and trepidation in wartime. To me, it is the best of his early mature works before he got to “Schindler’s List.” Christian Bale at age 13 is incandescent in his film debut – he certainly delivers my all-time favorite child actor performance as a British boy separated from his parents in World War II Shanghai, during the Japanese invasion.

  The mid-section at the prisoner camp is a little draggy (I hate to admit), but you always feel you’re at the surrender of an epic that weaves us through historical tribulation and endurance – including a stumble into a stadium filled with ornate personal objects of past plush lives;…

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  Review by Matt The Snapper ★★★★ 1

  One of Spielberg’s greatest contributions to cinema was giving us Christian Bale.

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★½ 1

  69/100

  Gets pretty Spielberg-y at times—he still hadn't learned to distrust his populist instincts in a purely dramatic context—but the first hour or so, prior to the internment camp, is remarkably strong, not least in its depiction of Jamie as a budding young opportunist who encounters his disreputable future in Basie. (Malkovich gets one of the all-time great entrances here: head down, cap pulled low, just a torrent of wised-up speech; it's ages before we get a good look at his eyes. He'd already won critics' awards a couple years earlier for Killing Fields and Places in the Heart, but this was the role that defined him for me.) Really, you could repair a lot of the damage just by…