mdblist.com

7.4

/3820/

/58/

/67/

4.0

/3992/

/40/

Audience

/949/

Metacritics

/21/

The second film in Terence Davies's autobiographical series (along with "Trilogy" and "The Long Day Closes") is an impressionistic view of a working-class family in 1940s and 1950s Liverpool, based on Davies's own family. Through a series of exquisite tableaux Davies creates a deeply affecting photo album of a troubled family wrestling with the complexity of love.

7.4

/2908/

/32/

/43/

4.0

/4821/

/18/

Audience

/449/

Metacritics

/15/

Set in Kensington, a working-class district of Liverpool, England in mid-1950s, this is the story of eleven-year-old Bud, a sad and lonely boy. With cinema as his main source of solace, he haunts the local 'picture-house'. All the while, his family looms large in our peripheral vision as do the menacing bullies of his school, but Bud is the centre of attention both from the camera's angle and from his doting family.

6.4

/5268/

/242/

/136/

3.5

/5952/

/178/

Audience

/4618/

Metacritics

/30/

The story of American poet Emily Dickinson from her early days as a young schoolgirl to her later years as a reclusive, unrecognized artist.

6.2

/14941/

/294/

/187/

3.3

/6682/

/141/

Audience

/21131/

Metacritics

/30/

The wife of a British Judge is caught in a self-destructive love affair with a Royal Air Force pilot.

7.0

/7102/

/45/

/53/

3.6

/1528/

/99/

Audience

/5061/

Metacritics

/30/

A woman risks losing her chance of happiness with the only man she has ever loved.

6.4

/3407/

/146/

/72/

3.4

/3298/

/115/

Audience

/2599/

Metacritics

/24/

The daughter of a Scottish farmer comes of age in the early 1900s.

7.3

/1947/

/27/

/23/

3.6

/1469/

/59/

Audience

/2032/

Metacritics

/9/

"Of Time and The City" is both a love song and a eulogy to the director's birthplace of Liverpool, England. It is also a response to memory, reflection and the experience of losing a sense of place as the skyline changes and time takes it toll. The visual content of the film consists largely of archival clips of Liverpool from the 1940s to the 1960s, their nostalgic charm darkened by accompanying music and by the counterpoint of Davies’ dry, at times dyspeptic, voice-over narration. His voice thickens with emotion as he recalls the delights of juvenile movie-going or the ritual of a holiday trip to New Brighton, across the River Mersey, and hardens with contempt when he turns his gaze on the hoopla surrounding Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953.

6.2

/775/

/5/

/11/

3.3

/540/

/11/

Audience

/465/

Metacritics

/14/

While on a train, a teenage boy thinks about his life and the flamboyant aunt whose friendship acted as an emotional shield from his troubled family. This film evokes the haunting quality of memory while creating a heartfelt portrait of a boy's life in a rural 1940s Southern town.

7.5

/495/

/5/

/11/

3.9

/393/

Audience

/94/

These three semi-autobiographical short films by Terence Davies follow the journey of Robert Tucker, first seen as a hangdog child in "Children", then as a hollow-eyed middle-aged man in "Madonna and Child", and finally as a decrepit old man in "Death and Transfiguration". Dreamlike and profoundly moving.

7.1

/360/

/2/

/15/

3.5

/489/

Robert Tucker, a young gay man who is almost without affect, sits in various waiting rooms. As he sits, he recalls events from the year of his childhood when his father dies. He's ten or eleven that year, picked on by bullies at the Catholic school he attends. He seems friendless. At home, his mother is quiet, his father is ill and angry. After his father's death, there's a wake, the coffin arrives, the body is removed. The lad grieves, alone.

7.2

/295/

/13/

3.7

/356/

The second part of Terence Davies' trilogy revolving around Liverpudlian Robert Tucker, focusing on the character's efforts in middle-age to come to terms with his homosexuality.

7.4

/291/

/14/

3.8

/364/

In sepia tones, the film moves back and forth among three periods in Robert Tucker's life: he's an old man, near death, in a nursing home at Christmas time; he's in middle age caring for his cheerful but dying mother; he's a lad at Catholic school, practicing his catechism, going to confession for the first time, receiving the Eucharist, surrounded by the singing of a children's choir. In middle age, he looks through his scrapbook of photographs of muscular men; he recalls lovers and his mother's cremation. A nurse sits beside him on his last night; in his last breath, he reaches forward and back.

/2/