The Long Day Closes

9/17/2021

Okay, I get it. This movie is artistic. Plot and character development are secondary, irrelevant even perhaps. The film is about visual snapshots, emotional memories that are alternately nostalgic or slightly painful. But I think the movie tries so hard that it fails to entertain, choosing to assume that if you don’t like it, that is okay, because it means you don’t “get” it. For example, do we really need the camera to linger on an empty scene like a stairway for 15 to 30 seconds after someone has walked up them? What does that add to the emotional impact of the film? And how illustrative is it to watch the boy stare at nothing for several moments without giving us any indication what he is thinking or feeling? Shouldn’t we care? And is it good cinema to have the characters mumble so t

12/7/2025

Why this this didn’t get even one BAFTA nomination is quite a puzzle as it’s a beautiful piece of cinema that uses it’s own industry’s nostalgia to paint a picture of a young boy longing for that intangible something we all want as our teens loom large. This story is set in a Liverpool still recovering from the end of the war, and where the young “Bud” (Leigh McCormack) lives with adoring mum (Marjorie Yates) and his three siblings. He is a quiet lad, and of course that earns him the enmity of the bullies at his local Catholic school where the cane is as much the currency as then pen. It’s not that he is lonely in any melodramatic sense, it’s that his soul is restless for a life he has seen encapsulated in his favourite place - his cinema. He could live in the place and is fascinated by ev