Robin Tunney

(On TV, January 2020) I started watching Empire Records without great hopes, expecting that I’d go do something else while it played. But I ended up unexpectedly captivated by the result. It’s not much of a movie in strictly conventional terms: Structured as a day-in-the-life of record store employees (albeit on the store’s last day as an independent, as they also host a major 1980s singer), it’s a mixture of various short subplots thrown together around a common setting. But there’s quite a bit of charm to the result—and even more now as a time capsule of what it could have felt like to work in a record store in the mid-1990s. As befits the setting, Empire Records has a wall-to-wall soundtrack of 1990s alternative music, and it sounds even better today than back then. The script has a pleasant rhythm to it, with some characters inhabiting a slightly different reality from the others—at least two of them have a special relationship with the fourth wall, leading to some of the film’s funniest moments. Other characters have their own far more conventional dramas, and the ensemble show the fun dynamics of a close-knit group. The cast is remarkable for featuring early appearances by some actors who would go on to better things. Robin Tunney and Liv Tyler are both eye-catching enough, but the out-of-persona surprise here is probably Renée Zellweger as a promiscuous teenager. Empire Records is all slight but good fun, although I suspect that my age (I was twenty in 1995) has something to do with it. [January 2025: It’s funny what sticks in mind from a film, and five years later my favourite quote from the film is still “Empire Records, open ’till midnight, this is Mark. (beat) Midnight.”]