This is an amazing, poetic and beautiful film by acclaimed Gay British filmmaker Terence Davies. It merges memoir and city symphony in this valedictory visit to the vanishing Liverpool where he grew up gay, poor, Catholic, and movie-mad. The social history of postwar Britain forms the backdrop to this luminous tapestry woven from archival footage, poetry pop-songs, and Davies' own resonantly sardonic/sepulchral voice.

Here's the Reader review:
Terence Davies, England's greatest living filmmaker, has released only six features, and this one is his first documentary, a mesmerizing and eloquent essay about his native Liverpool. As autobiographical and intensely personal as Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), it encompasses his working-class background, his loss of faith in Catholicism (and, more generally, religion), and his evolution as a homosexual, as well as his taste in music and cinema. The film is made up chiefly of found footage and therefore lacks the mise en scene of its predecessors, but it has the added benefit of Davies's voice-over narration, which, thanks to his training and experience as an actor, is enormously powerful. (Check out the witty way he conveys his disdain for the Beatles through his delivery of one of their best-known refrains.) 72 min. -- Jonathan Rosenbaum