The Long Day Closes

One of the greatest films of the 1990s, Terence Davies’s sublime memory piece is at once a dreamily poignant evocation of childhood’s end, a richly textured musical of everyday life, and a singular fusion of narrative and avant-garde storytelling. Set amid a lovingly re-created 1950s Liverpool, the film is a free-flowing fountain of impressions both wondrous (the cinema, holiday celebrations, mother) and painful (school, bullies, loneliness) that together form a portrait of a young gay boy (Leigh McCormack) coming of age as an outsider. Through it all, Davies wrings glowing, Dream Factory nostalgia from a collage-like soundtrack that drifts from Nat King Cole to snatches of MGM musicals to, in one of the film’s most magical moments, Debbie Reynolds warbling “Tammy.”