Hannah Gatward

Terence Davies’s sumptuous story of New York high society returns to UK cinemas this week. In our October 2000 issue, Philip Horne explored what made the film “an unpredictable, unformulaic success”. 23 October 2025 With Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), his wonderfully moving, fragmented chronicle of his family history in the years after World War II, Terence Davies became noted as Britain’s most exquisitely gifted filmmaker.

Together with his long-term partner Flo Jacobs, Ken emerged as a towering figure of the post-war avant-garde, whose work straddled politics, play and illusions while pushing beyond the traditional limits of cinema. 23 October 2025 “I am in fact an all-around sensualist.” In this statement, the American artist and filmmaker Ken Jacobs, who has died aged 92, gestured to the inseparability of life and art that exemplified his every day.

The sonorously voiced Liverpudlian filmmaker Terence Davies was a soulful, distinctive presence in modern British cinema for over 40 years. Despite long gaps between films at certain phases, and his often being thought of as an outsider of the industry, his inimitable body of work is filled with a compassion and melancholy that stretched across a generation. Over his career, he directed nine feature films.