Sightlines · reception

How The Long Day Closes was received

1992 · Terence Davies · The Long Day Closes on Sightlines

The arc

Admired but hardly seen when it premiered in competition at Cannes in 1992, it spent years as the 'other' Davies memory film behind Distant Voices, Still Lives; decades of critical devotion and a 2014 Criterion release have since re-crowned it, for many, as his masterpiece and one of the great British films of the 90s.

What’s debated

The perennial split: transcendent memory-cinema or 85 exquisitely lit minutes in which nothing happens — with a side skirmish over whether this or Distant Voices, Still Lives is peak Davies.

Its footprint

The overhead tracking shot drifting across a carpet to Debbie Reynolds' 'Tammy' is one of cinephilia's endlessly reposted proof-that-cinema-is-magic images, a fixture of greatest-shots lists and video essays.

Where it stands

A slow-burn canon climber turned cinephile sacred object — the 'you must see this' gateway into Terence Davies.

Did you know? For a film that's a love letter to moviegoing, you never see a single frame of any film Bud watches — the cinema exists purely as sound, with audio from pictures like The Magnificent Ambersons and Kind Hearts and Coronets drifting over Davies' images.

Named by the director

• Young at Heart (1954) — Davies repeatedly named the Doris Day–Frank Sinatra musical his favorite film, the epitome of the Hollywood rapture his childhood moviegoing — and this film about it — was steeped in.