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What do you remember of your childhood? Other than major events, the majority of your memories are probably vaguely defined and few films have more deftly captured that hazy recollection of youth than Terence Davies’ riveting “The Long Day Closes.” More of an art piece than a traditional narrative, the film, recently added to The Criterion Collection, may first seem slow but becomes transfixing in the deliberate way that its creator doesn’t seek to replicate history but his memory of it.

Rating: 4.5/5.0

With dozens of songs, many of them in their entirety (we hear three before a line of dialogue), and some still shots that have the beauty of an artist’s eye, “The Long Day Closes” is a beautifully conceived and executed. A mother singing quietly to herself as she makes tea, the reflection of rain on a boy’s ceiling, the escape of the cinema — “The Long Day Closes...

The inimitable Terence Davies gets his first Criterion treatment this month with his 1992 title, The Long Day Closes, a superb memory poem drenched in melancholy nostalgia. A follow-up to the much more dark and brutal Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), Davies returns once more to the memoirs of a ravaged childhood, further expanded upon from his first three short films which comprised The Terence Davies Trilogy (1976-1984). Swimming freely between quiet fantasy sequences and recollections of free associations as we drift in and out of abandoned ramshackle buildings of the past like a restless spirit, there is a delicate and fragile longing in Davies’ second feature, a ruminative exploration absent from the pained dirge of his previous film.

Bud (Leigh McCormack) is a bright and lonely 11 year old boy growing up in 1950’s Liverpool. Absent a father figure, Bud spends most of his time at home with his mother (Marjorie Yates...

★★☆☆☆ Carol Morley's 2010 feature debut Edge is likely to be one of the most frustrating and misguided releases of the year. This dreary story, written and directed by Morley (responsible for last year's wonderful documentary Dreams of a Life) and starring Maxine Peake, Marjorie Yates and Joe Dempsie, plays like an overextended episode of one of the television dramas for which the majority of the cast appear to be better known.

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