Letterboxd — Your life in film

imagine a standard, shallow, walk hard-esque elvis biopic, but from the point of view of a tom hanks snl character and directed by someone on both lsd and cocaine. certain moments and sequences in this are absolutely stunning. totally hyper and utterly unwieldy in its visual stylings that it can almost be hard to keep up with. at a certain point, as exciting as it often was, it became numbing and exhausting. then, at other times, it feels like a…

Davies’ impressionism is still present - but often found more in grace notes sprinkled throughout the narrative, rather than the somewhat more frequent abstraction of his earlier works. the overlaying and montaging of images during the poem voiceovers is staggeringly beautiful, the compositional flow is just un-fucking-real, and so thoughtfully evocative. a shot of a tennis court, the net going vertically up the middle of the frame, dissolving into two lovers swimming through it from above and below - total…

National myth getting the Terence Davies aesthetic treatment. It starts similar to The Neon Bible in how it allows him to use another author’s material to play around a series of signifiers that are rather familiar to his fans (the first act build around Peter Mullan’s brute father in particular suffers from diminishing returns). The key difference is that he actually forges a genuine connection to the Scottish landscape that he never had to the early film. It takes a…

The Deep Blue Sea is like one of those soggy, overcast winter weekdays where you wake up at the end of the afternoon and lay on the couch all day without turning the lights on. It gets dark in the early evening without your realizing it and then you suddenly feel the need to leave the house, completely unaware of how bitterly frigid it is outside. Terence Davies, like Kelly Reichardt, strikes me as a director I wouldn't ordinarily groove…