Customer Reviews
Atmospheric film of America's poor south - By: Sally Wilton, 03 May 2007 
I loved this throughout. Beautifully filmed with excellent acting. The unbelievably brilliant child actor in the first part of the film plays his part so movingly it would be hard not to shed a few tears. Bullied by his rather macho father he grows close to his glamorous aunt, a former nightclub singer & becomes aware of his feminine side. The whole film is reallly a study of close family relationships in a harsh environment touched too by events inlcluding the 2nd world war & mental illness.
Outstanding - By: , 19 Aug 2004 Davies regards 'The Neon Bible' as a failure. It is certainly a transitional work between the previous 'autobiographical' films & the later 'The House of Mirth' but it must be regarded as an outstanding film. What makes 'The Neon Bible' distinctive is not just the usual canon of Davies tricks which carry over from 'Distant Voices, Still Lives', 'The Long Day Closes' (and to a certain extent 'Death & Transfiguration') but the newer ingedients which he adds - the long camera pans & scene disolves are here rendered visuallly stunning with the use of colours against the more traditional Davies blacks. Rowlands is wonderful, as are alll the cast, & Davies knows exactly how to get the best from his actors.
Britain has few great film directors & we are a country who, much like the USA, is mediocre in the cinema. In the late 1980s Godard stated that he thought alll British cinema in that decade was rubbish with one exception: 'Distant Voices, Still Lives'. He may have been a bit harsh. But 'The Neon Bible' can stand alongside that masterpiece as a film worthy of the term 'great'.
A beautiful film - By: Ben Elliss, 15 Mar 2000 'The Neon Bible' was one of the two novels completed by author John Kennedy Toole before he took his own life (the other is the brilliant & as-yet-unfilmed 'Confederacy of Dunces'). It's been transferred to the cinema very effectively by the English director Terence Davis, & the finished product looks like the sort of film Edward Hopper would have made if he hadn't been a painter. The Bible of the title is a reference to the oppressive force of evangelical religion in the American South. The story follows David (Jacob Tierney), a sensitive young boy in an dysfunctional family with a violent father (Dennis Leary). Choked by religion & cruelty, David's story unfolds as a sad tragedy. The cinematography of this film is beautiful, & it definitely deserves five stars.
