“Terence Davies, the most poetic living British film-maker (The Long Day Closes, Distant Voices, Still Lives) concocts an affectionate but acidic memoir of his Liverpool childhood, that raids the archives for a spellbinding portrait of mid-century Britain. The soundtrack (of music he chooses and words he writes and speaks) add up to an experience so heartfelt, it verges on transcendent.” — Peter Calder, New Zealand Herald

“Of Time and the City, Terence Davies’s wonderful new documentary, is a portrait of the filmmaker’s Liverpool childhood that grows organically into a social history of Britain... Davies’ first completed film in seven years is an elegiac rhapsody spiked with satire, a blast of brilliant eloquence visual and verbal. Davies loves the old Liverpool and old England, but his nostalgia comes with warheads attached. Changes for the worse during an eventful half-century for city and country are addressed with wit and an almost biblical scorn, from the country’s coronation-induced epidemic of monarchism (“the Betty Windsor show”) to the high-rise horrors of the 1960s housing estate boom...

His narration can turn from the precision farce of a school sports day – ‘someone collapsing from heatstroke because the temperature rose a couple of points above freezing’ – to the rich, enhanced acoustic of verse lines quoted from Auden or Eliot. The visuals are an inspired selection of archive shots and sequences and home-movie moments. Their memorable images are like a firework display of the past, leaping bright and incendiary into the present: the bombings, the war footage, the coronation kitsch, the ugliness of the postwar rebuilds, the beauty of the people (always and everywhere), the hope, the horror, the defiant hymning of human endurance. When all else fails – which is barely ever – Davies summons to the soundtrack the potency of cheap music (“He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”, “The Folks Who Live on the Hill”). It all works. It all stirs, provokes and bewitches. This is a film of love, passion and indignation, full of startling beauties.” — Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

“The movie is brashly emotional and sentimental – sometimes angry, more often hilarious. Nothing has given me more pleasure this year: the sweetness of its temper, the unfashionable seriousness of its design and its mixture of worldliness and innocence make for something sublime... His aperçus and jokes are too numerous to quote here, but the tone turns on a sixpence from compassion, to gentleness, to rage. He is full of pure love for the working men and women who lived tough lives with hardly a complaint, and Liverpool’s forgotten generation of servicemen who went off to fight in the Korean war – one of many profoundly moving sequences. I was reminded of Philip Larkin’s request that his poems should be read aloud as simply as if giving directions in the street: Davies’ poetic cinema has precisely this clarity and force.” — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian