Ian Nathan of "Empire" magazine gave the film a perfect five-star rating, proclaiming "it's generally agreed that "The Empire Strikes Back" is the best film of George Lucas' initial trilogy (despite a latter-day shift toward the original's storytelling purity). Not a sequel as such, but the next part of a continuing story, Empire marks enormous progression both in terms of the mythos of the series and in the filmmaking quality itself." In 2014, the magazine's readers voted for the film as the greatest movie ever made, based on 250,000 votes.