Terence Davies's adaptation of the posthumous adolescent novel by John Kennedy Toole takes the filmmaker out of the autobiographical material and British working-class milieu of Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, and plops him down in post-Depression Dixie: a less personal film, but strenuously personalized. The imposition, in alien surroundings, of his idiosyncratic style and sensibility (the songs, the studio artifice, the use of windows and doors as frames within the frame, the constant aestheticizing of raw life) is doubtless somewhat uncomfortable; even, as with the equally rigid manner of Robert Bresson, somewhat ridiculous; but somewhat fascinating, too. Gena Rowlands, Diana Scarwid, Denis Leary. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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