Popular reviews

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★★ 4

  Every new Terence Davies film feels like a miracle, in no small part because most of them are. Not even Terry Gilliam has had such a tough time of shepherding projects to the screen. Davies' style has alienated him to most financiers, his shame has alienated him from many queer critics and his nature has denied him the reverent mystique that clings to other auteurs who make films at the same rate — Davies has been butchered for many of the same qualities that make Terrence Malick a holy cow. He's now 70 years old, and each of his successfully completed films arrives like a merciful act of the God to whom Davies no longer speaks.

  Never has that been…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★½ 1

  70

  This is bleak stuff, even for Terence Davies. At a certain point in the middle, it's a bit much in the misery department, often incessant and one-note, but Agyness Deyn centers this epic in a psychological register, with key excerpts from the source text functioning as bridges between certain passages of the film. Davies is (rightfully) focusing on the larger picture here - with a dichotomy of family and country, love and loss, and the physicality of the protagonist's abuse received from her father vs. the long-lasting reverberations of her own trauma. It doesn't always lift the material to stable territory, but there are images and moments in Sunset Song that I'll probably be thinking about for the rest of my life (the wedding sequence, my god), so give it a watch.

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★ 2

  the patriarchy... not great imo

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  Review by jpark ★★★★★ 3

  An invigorating blend of old and new, both challenging and dynamic, uniquely sweet and sorrowful, Sunset Song deserves to be celebrated. This film has a soul, a deeply felt emotional core that reveals itself over the course of Davies well earned two hour run time. He employs formalist techniques; perfect symmetry, painterly landscapes and overtly authentic interiors, and blends them seamlessly with fresh and vibrant postmodernist touches. The wind, birds, mud and crickets provide a soaring score; the subtlety underpinning every line of dialogue, every dramatic quarrel is swiftly emphasized by their smallness relative to the sweeping landscapes. Davies' core idea is something I haven't seen since Westerns of old, the awareness of consistency, of the eternal. People, their relationships,…

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  Review by Milo ★★★★½

  Prime Video

  So bleak, darker than dark but not without its fair share of happier moments in the darkness and despair. Sunset Song echoes A Hidden Life in what it's trying to achieve - innocent men victims of a war that they're forced to fight in shaped by its nature; with Davies crafting an ode to motherhood in the process. Originally thought it would be among his weakest but it's anything but - a real powerhouse of an artistic triumph, right up there with the best of them - beautifully shot and tragic right to its core.

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  Review by ShawnGlinis ★★★★★ 2

  thought this was gonna be minor(ish) Davies, but it's a complete knockout. a beautiful and devastating film from the saddest man to do it. remarkable in how it fits in between Davies' protagonists from Deep Blue Sea and A Quiet Passion, and a performance from Deyn that is able to handle the maturity that's so key to the entire film.

  how Chris' mother and father, each in separate ways, reverberate through the rest of this film is haunting.

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  Review by Carol Grant

  Devastating. Would make a great double feature with A Hidden Life with regard to epics about rural idyll giving way to the creep of nationalism, set against a backdrop of uncaring nature and land, indifferent to the cruel ideologies that set out to "protect" it.

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★½ 3

  43/100

  A crushing disappointment. For a while, I assumed my general distaste for stories about tyrannical fathers was the problem, exacerbated by the overly familiar presence of Peter Mullan as the bad dad in question. Even after that character (let's say) recedes, however, Davies' touch here seems clumsy and coarse, above and beyond any extent to which that could be argued as appropriate for the source material (unread by me). Even the lyrical passages, which are mostly land-related, feel somewhat leaden. Whatever Gibbons' novel means to Davies—and it must mean a lot, as he reportedly spent many years struggling to get this film made—it doesn't come across, except perhaps in the occasional juxtaposition of brutality and joyous group song. A…

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  Review by Sam B. ★★★★★

  one of the most beautiful movies ever made, for one. and also so gorgeously narrated and performed. I cried more or less the whole time. A “woman’s picture” so effortlessly transcendent and *true*, finding something fully authentic to the pain and beauty of actually living, day in and day out, and the wonder and humbling power of our ability exist, not forever, and not unchanged, but for long, in conjunction with a land, not just in ownership. almost sneakily a masterpiece.

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★

  far from the madding crowd

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★½

  Exactly 90 words on Sunset Song:

  Out of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic novel, performed in that book’s hybrid Scots-English dialect (with mostly superfluous subtitles for the Americans), Davies fashions a gorgeous inversion of Hollywood women’s melodrama. Sure, his heroine Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn) suffers considerably, but where the Golden Age classics trafficked in schadenfreude at the sufferings of their independent women, Davies finds absolution in Chris’s determined resistance to the patriarchal psychoses that possess first her father then her husband. An Old World rebuke to American solipsism: tomorrow is not another day–only the land endures.

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  Review by Melissa Tamminga ★★★★½

  "He could fair play, the piper, he tore at your heart marching there with the tune leaping up the moor and echoing across the loch . . . " ~Lewis Grassic Gibbon

  Terence Davies, filmmaker, piper.

  SIFF 2016