The Terence Davies Trilogy

Children: 80 - pared down, but powerful social realism inflected with brilliant and totally non-gratuitous moments of stark poetry. Madonna and Child: 90 - becomes more abstract. Gorgeous. Death and Transfiguration: 70 - not as powerful as the two prior films.

"There's no MGM musical scored to a gay romance, you know?" http://illusionpodcast.blogspot.com/2014/09/episode-30-first-terence-davies-episode.html

A collection of three very autobiographical short films that span childhood, adulthood, and death. Despite how audacious that may sound, this is a pretty unremarkable experience -- depressing realist British films have been done better than this.

Davies' skill improves with each entry in the trilogy, whereas Children can occasionally feel a tad thrown together (though still great) by Death and Transfiguration he seems to have mastered knowing exactly what to show and when to show it to create a hugely effective torrent of pain, love, Catholic guilt, burgeoning sexuality, even nostalgia. All three films are extremely poetic and filmed in stunning, beautiful, stark black and white. Bares immediate comparison to the Bill Douglas trilogy.

Though some of the technical elements are planted firmly in amateur territory, The Terence Davies Trilogy is a beautiful, and thoroughly disturbing, examination of life and death, masculinity, homosexuality, love, and loss. Terry O'Sullivan's final scene is as haunting as they come.

The juvenile paleness of "Children" didn't gave a up ahead of last short's unconfortable darkness. Still, you can't wait good vibe from a movie called "Death and Transfiguration". It is, anyway, an amazing slow-pace chronicle about guilty, love, death and memory.

Ultimately a complete movie, composed of three short films that were created years apart: _Children_, _Madonna and Child_, and _Death and Transfiguration_. A rough draft for Davies's later work, as _Who's That Knocking At My Door?_ was for Scorsese; this is much better than that other movie, though. Not to be seen by those prone to depression :-)