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
