A documentary by Terence Davies. Unrated. Plays Friday, February 6, and Sunday to Tuesday, February 8 to 10, at the Vancity Theatre

Terence Davies, one of cinema’s grandest curmudgeons, takes a valedictory look at his beloved/benighted Liverpool and exhibits all the breathtaking, borderline-infuriating effects he brought to elegiac features like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes.

This short, hypnotically diaristic documentary—his first effort since 2000’s surprisingly straightforward The House of Mirth—mixes elegantly presented archival footage with luxurious new shots of some of the same places in the port city today.

As usual, the main concern is the delicious agony and subdued ecstasy of growing up gay and Catholic, “between canon and the criminal law”. He’s most moving in the depiction of sepulchral movie palaces, home of black-and-white Hollywood fare in which “it was always Christmas, and it was always perfect”.

Most things are barely adequate for Davies, except in memory. (Now 63, he seems much older.) He is withering on the subject of the royals, or “The Betty Windsor Show”, but he is just as dismayed by the march of progress. Even allowing for his doggedly contrarian views (he once told me he viewed the Beatles as “talentless ruffians”), his tastes are confusingly perverse. Why knock the mop-tops and then underscore a Korean War sequence with a slice of latter-day Hollies treacle like “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”?

Elsewhere, his taste is more erudite. The Gustav Mahler symphony that overwhelms the film’s last quarter is a bit heavy-handed, but there are many beautiful pieces to go along with quotes from Anton Chekhov, Philip Larkin, and T. S. Eliot; as well, the attribution in his plummy narration is weirdly uneven. But that’s our Terence, isn’t it—keeping us on our toes even when we know that in the end, he’ll be disappointed anyway.