The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, May 4-10
Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)
Directed by Terence Davies
A stunner of a first feature, this episodic chronicle of working-class life in postwar Liverpool was a personal and public exorcism for Davies, marked by his enduring compassion—never more so than when he observes his characters’ impromptu renditions of trad singalongs and pop standards. (It’s not a stretch to call Distant Voices a musical, but neither is the label a helpful one.) With devotional simplicity and heartbreaking tenderness, its virtuoso set pieces of family ceremony and quotidian ritual lay bare a generation’s worth of compromises and betrayals. A masterpiece of the most exalted plane. Eli Goldfarb (May 8, 2:30pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s Davies retrospective, with Davies in person for multiple screenings across the opening week)