Critics reviews

It's both a first person historical essay and a visual poem. Combining archival and newsreel footage, it is layered with Davies' intimate voiceover of readings from Eliot, Dickinson, and Chekhov, personal recollections, and his carefully curated musical accents. It is both warm and biting; a melancholy (farewell) love letter, which is also, like so much of Davies' work, very funny.

Terence Davies blends tender emotion with deliciously irreverent, savage wit in his highly personal and poetic documentary-collage of Liverpool.

Upon a second viewing, my admiration for this film remains at a slight remove. Whether it's the candid reflections on specifically Liverpoolian rites of passage, the sometimes too-florid (for my taste, at least) baritone narration of Davies himself, or the identity of the filmmaker as a homosexual working-class outcast (something only so much empathetic guesswork can account for), I've always felt a certain opaqueness here.

In drawing again on his life, following a brace of literary adaptations (The Neon Bible, The House of Mirth) that invoke it only obliquely, Davies somewhat miraculously finds a new angle: the friction between the artist anchored in the past, and the world that continues turning.

It starts slow, relying too much on too-generic quotes about the movie's main subjects, the passage of time and the city of Davies's youth: "If Liverpool did not exist, it would have to be invented." But things soon get interesting as the filmmaker, then 63, touched on some personal landmarks (falling for the movies, realizing that he was gay, becoming "a very happy, very contented born-again atheist—thank God") and then unsheathes a waspish stinger.

[Davies'] narration, blending slightly overripe stream-of-conscious remembrances with quotes from the likes of James Joyce and Engels, is like listening to a grumpy intellectual grandfather. But the wisdom and feeling buried beneath the sarcastic sourness is somehow oddly endearing. When he gripes about The Beatles and rock & roll displacing the smoothness of pop you're almost ready to agree with him.

Of Time and the City is not merely an elegy for the Liverpool of Davies's childhood; it's an elegy for a good classical education in literature and music.

For many people, Liverpool's cultural contribution begins and ends with the Beatles, and Davies does little to update that view, except to focus on its postwar [and] modern architecture... The film invites a reverie. It inspired thoughts of the transience of life.

There's no denying the intensity of Davies' commitment to both his vision and his art. At the beginning of the film he invites us in to share his dreams of his Liverpool past, and if the overall tone is one of sadness and loss, at the same time that tone is countered by Davies' very act of filmmaking. Through cinema the past is regained and made one with the present — that's always been at the core of Davies' filmmaking practice.

“Of Time and the City” is a difficult film to describe but a distinct pleasure to experience... Most of all, Davies proves himself to be a poet of the commonplace whose art is the exalting of the everyday. He may rail against “the British genius for creating the dismal,” but his own work is anything but.

Some moments are intimate and moving, but the film is often distant from its subject, and the sum total is only intermittently compelling. Of Time and the City doesn't make it entirely clear that Davies wanted to take this anti-nostalgia trip.

”Documentary” is too impersonal a word and ”visual poem” is too mushy a phrase to describe Of Time and the City, a short, beautiful, characteristically sublime memory piece... [Davies] narrates his own script with words chosen so carefully that the enraptured listener is moved from laughter to tears to a swollen heart.