"Arguably the most important British filmmaker of his generation, Terence Davies is a poet of the cinema, at once austere and passionate... Davies developed a process dependent on meticulously designed shots, tableau-like evocations of memory linked by emotional (and musical) association more than narrative chronology... Although the 1950s childhood evoked in both Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes is in many ways painful and even harrowing, the films transcend social realism and self-pity in their distilled stylization, their loving recreation of time and space, and moments of intense communal joy (often involving song, cinema, or even slapstick comedy). Their combination of art-film style and reverence for working-class popular culture is unique in British cinema." - Tom Charity, The Rough Guide to Film