The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 2-8
The Long Day Closes (1992)
Directed by Terence Davies
There may not be such a thing as a perfect movie, but the The Long Day Closes is the closest anyone’s ever come. Placing us in a shadowplay carousel propelled by love of cinema, Davies’s vignettes of his childhood fade in and out a sense at a time. The sounds of happy Englanders singing away their free nights now that the boom of explosives have been replaced with free, beautiful silent night air. The sight of his boy hero looking at the camera as if it’s a movie screen filling his head with dreams and promise. The feeling of relief now that England lives no longer under the pall of war, and Davies’s family his sadistic father; the way rooms are gentler, air softer and warmer, light more romantic. The smell of dusty movie houses, popcorn wafting up the stairs from the concessions, past the drab, hand-me-down fabrics of each patron’s clothes and into their hungry nostrils. The taste of promise; your life is ahead of you and yet how could anything be sweeter than right now? Scout Tafoya (March 5, 12pm at the Metrograph’s “Surrender to the Screen”)
