A pair of druggy, licentious agitators invade a 17th-century Shropshire homestead in this eerie period melodrama from Brit indie director Thomas Clay
Thomas Clay is a British film-making talent who has been off the radar for a while, and cinema has been the duller for it. There had been nothing since his troubling and shocking debut The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael in 2005 and the Bangkok-set followup Soi Cowboy in 2008. Now Clay has returned with a stark, bleak horror-melodrama of the English Revolution: a 17th-century period piece with eerie echoes of other genres: home invasion thriller, spaghetti western, folk horror, post-apocalyptic survivalist drama. It is a tough, disturbing watch about an ecstatic awakening through violence and – with a twinge – I wondered if Clay had returned to the shock rhetoric of his debut about a rape. As it happens there is emphasis placed here on consent.
Like Peter Strickland, Clay is...
Thomas Clay is a British film-making talent who has been off the radar for a while, and cinema has been the duller for it. There had been nothing since his troubling and shocking debut The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael in 2005 and the Bangkok-set followup Soi Cowboy in 2008. Now Clay has returned with a stark, bleak horror-melodrama of the English Revolution: a 17th-century period piece with eerie echoes of other genres: home invasion thriller, spaghetti western, folk horror, post-apocalyptic survivalist drama. It is a tough, disturbing watch about an ecstatic awakening through violence and – with a twinge – I wondered if Clay had returned to the shock rhetoric of his debut about a rape. As it happens there is emphasis placed here on consent.
Like Peter Strickland, Clay is...
- 10/10/2019
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Long-awaited UK movie Fanny Lye Deliver’d, a regular fixture on Cannes prediction lists, has finally been delivered.
Thomas Clay’s third feature, shot in 35mm, bows this week at the BFI London Film Festival after more than three years in post-production, a delay that prompted speculation over the movie’s health and whereabouts. Ahead of the film’s premiere, Deadline had the first opportunity to sit down with multi-hyphenate Clay and get the inside track on his passion project’s winding road to screen.
“It’s going to be strange putting the film in front of an audience, it has been so long,” the 40 year-old director tells us. Clay, whose previous two feature-length films played at Cannes (The Great Ecstasy Of Robert Carmichael in 2005 and Soi Cowboy in 2008), has spent the best part of a decade working on this feature.
Styled as a “Puritan Western,” Fanny Lye stars Maxine Peake...
Thomas Clay’s third feature, shot in 35mm, bows this week at the BFI London Film Festival after more than three years in post-production, a delay that prompted speculation over the movie’s health and whereabouts. Ahead of the film’s premiere, Deadline had the first opportunity to sit down with multi-hyphenate Clay and get the inside track on his passion project’s winding road to screen.
“It’s going to be strange putting the film in front of an audience, it has been so long,” the 40 year-old director tells us. Clay, whose previous two feature-length films played at Cannes (The Great Ecstasy Of Robert Carmichael in 2005 and Soi Cowboy in 2008), has spent the best part of a decade working on this feature.
Styled as a “Puritan Western,” Fanny Lye stars Maxine Peake...
- 10/8/2019
- by Tom Grater
- Deadline Film + TV
Exclusive: Period drama from director Thomas Clay and the producer of the well-received Couple In A Hole.
Shooting has wrapped on Fanny Lye Deliver’d, a period drama starring Maxine Peake (The Theory of Everything), Charles Dance (Game of Thrones) and Freddie Fox (The Riot Club). The cast also includes Tanya Reynolds in her first feature film role and Peter McDonald (The Stag).
Shot over ten weeks on location in Shropshire, England, the film is written and directed by Thomas Clay and produced by Zorana Piggott (Couple In A Hole), Rob Cannan (The Lovers and the Despot) and Philippe Bober. The late Joseph Lang, Clay’s long-time producer, receives a posthumous producing credit.
Set in 1657 on an isolated farm in Shropshire, the story follows Fanny Lye (Peake) as she learns to transcend her oppressive marriage and discovers a new world of possibility.
Living a life of puritan stricture with husband John Lye (Dance) and young son Arthur...
Shooting has wrapped on Fanny Lye Deliver’d, a period drama starring Maxine Peake (The Theory of Everything), Charles Dance (Game of Thrones) and Freddie Fox (The Riot Club). The cast also includes Tanya Reynolds in her first feature film role and Peter McDonald (The Stag).
Shot over ten weeks on location in Shropshire, England, the film is written and directed by Thomas Clay and produced by Zorana Piggott (Couple In A Hole), Rob Cannan (The Lovers and the Despot) and Philippe Bober. The late Joseph Lang, Clay’s long-time producer, receives a posthumous producing credit.
Set in 1657 on an isolated farm in Shropshire, the story follows Fanny Lye (Peake) as she learns to transcend her oppressive marriage and discovers a new world of possibility.
Living a life of puritan stricture with husband John Lye (Dance) and young son Arthur...
- 5/3/2016
- by michael.rosser@screendaily.com (Michael Rosser)
- ScreenDaily
Exclusive: Euro sales outfit inks additional deals after Amazon Studios took Us rights.
Philippe Bober’s Coproduction Office has announced a raft of sales on Benjamin Dickinson’s SXSW award winner Creative Control.
Ahead of its market premiere this week at the Efm, Coproduction Office has confirmed sales in Canada (Mongrel), Benelux (De Filmfreak), Poland (Against Gravity) and Turkey (Kurmaca Film).
Amazon Studios acquired the Us rights and Magnolia Pictures will distribute the film in theatres before it plays on Amazon. Theatrical release date is set for March 11 to be followed by DVD and VOD windows.
Coproduction Office’s slate for Berlin also includes intriguing new projects by Swedish auteurs Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure), Roy Andersson (A Pigeon Sat On A Branch) and Thomas Clay (The Great Ecstasy Of Robert Carmichael), all in pre-production.
Creative Control is set in New York, five minutes in the future. David (writer/director Benjamin Dickinson) is an overworked, tech-addled advertising...
Philippe Bober’s Coproduction Office has announced a raft of sales on Benjamin Dickinson’s SXSW award winner Creative Control.
Ahead of its market premiere this week at the Efm, Coproduction Office has confirmed sales in Canada (Mongrel), Benelux (De Filmfreak), Poland (Against Gravity) and Turkey (Kurmaca Film).
Amazon Studios acquired the Us rights and Magnolia Pictures will distribute the film in theatres before it plays on Amazon. Theatrical release date is set for March 11 to be followed by DVD and VOD windows.
Coproduction Office’s slate for Berlin also includes intriguing new projects by Swedish auteurs Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure), Roy Andersson (A Pigeon Sat On A Branch) and Thomas Clay (The Great Ecstasy Of Robert Carmichael), all in pre-production.
Creative Control is set in New York, five minutes in the future. David (writer/director Benjamin Dickinson) is an overworked, tech-addled advertising...
- 2/11/2016
- by geoffrey@macnab.demon.co.uk (Geoffrey Macnab)
- ScreenDaily
Exclusive: Amazon Studio has taken the title’s Us right ahead of its Efm market premiere.
Philippe Bober’s Coproduction Office has announced a raft of sales on Benjamin Dickinson’s SXSW award winner Creative Control.
Ahead of its market premiere this week at the Efm, Coproduction Office has confirmed sales in Canada (Mongrel), Benelux (De Filmfreak), Poland (Against Gravity) and Turkey (Kurmaca Film).
Amazon Studios acquired the Us rights and Magnolia Pictures will distribute the film in theatres before it plays on Amazon. Theatrical release date is set for March 11 to be followed by DVD and VOD windows.
Coproduction Office’s slate for Berlin also includes intriguing new projects by Swedish auteurs Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure), Roy Andersson (A Pigeon Sat On A Branch) and Thomas Clay (The Great Ecstasy Of Robert Carmichael), all in pre-production.
Creative Control is set in New York, five minutes in the future. David (writer/director Benjamin Dickinson) is an overworked...
Philippe Bober’s Coproduction Office has announced a raft of sales on Benjamin Dickinson’s SXSW award winner Creative Control.
Ahead of its market premiere this week at the Efm, Coproduction Office has confirmed sales in Canada (Mongrel), Benelux (De Filmfreak), Poland (Against Gravity) and Turkey (Kurmaca Film).
Amazon Studios acquired the Us rights and Magnolia Pictures will distribute the film in theatres before it plays on Amazon. Theatrical release date is set for March 11 to be followed by DVD and VOD windows.
Coproduction Office’s slate for Berlin also includes intriguing new projects by Swedish auteurs Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure), Roy Andersson (A Pigeon Sat On A Branch) and Thomas Clay (The Great Ecstasy Of Robert Carmichael), all in pre-production.
Creative Control is set in New York, five minutes in the future. David (writer/director Benjamin Dickinson) is an overworked...
- 2/11/2016
- by geoffrey@macnab.demon.co.uk (Geoffrey Macnab)
- ScreenDaily
Exclusive: Writer-director Corinna McFarlane and producer Nicky Bentham talk about working with Eon’s Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson on The Silent Storm and their upcoming psychological thriller.
UK writer-director Corinna McFarlane, producer Nicky Bentham of Neon Films and executive producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson of Eon Productions are reuniting after their work on drama The Silent Storm to develop a new psychological thriller set in the California desert.
That project, set in the present day, is now at second draft script stage and Bentham says of Broccoli and Wilson, “it’s great to be working with them again.”
The Silent Storm, McFarlane’s fictional feature debut, premieres tonight at the BFI London Film Festival (WestEnd handles sales). Set on a remote Scottish island in the 1950s, it follows a 30-year-old woman (Andrea Riseborough) who is caught between her overbearing minister husband (Damian Lewis) and a charismatic 17-year old criminal (Ross Anderson) who is delivered...
UK writer-director Corinna McFarlane, producer Nicky Bentham of Neon Films and executive producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson of Eon Productions are reuniting after their work on drama The Silent Storm to develop a new psychological thriller set in the California desert.
That project, set in the present day, is now at second draft script stage and Bentham says of Broccoli and Wilson, “it’s great to be working with them again.”
The Silent Storm, McFarlane’s fictional feature debut, premieres tonight at the BFI London Film Festival (WestEnd handles sales). Set on a remote Scottish island in the 1950s, it follows a 30-year-old woman (Andrea Riseborough) who is caught between her overbearing minister husband (Damian Lewis) and a charismatic 17-year old criminal (Ross Anderson) who is delivered...
- 10/14/2014
- by wendy.mitchell@screendaily.com (Wendy Mitchell)
- ScreenDaily
Thomas Clay, director of 2008 film Soi Cowboy, pays tribute to 33-year-old as 'my closest colleague and best friend'
Members of the British film industry have paid tribute to Joseph Lang, who has died in Vietnam at the age of 33. The writer and producer was found dead on Monday outside a medical centre in Ho Chi Minh City. The cause of death is not yet known and Lang's Sussex-based family are awaiting the results of a post-mortem examination.
Lang's credits include the 2008 film Soi Cowboy, directed by Thomas Clay, described by the Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw as "a thoughtful and disquieting poetic meditation on the Thai experience of globalisation and its complex relationship with foreigners".
He also co-wrote and produced Clay's controversial 2005 feature The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, which starred Danny Dyer and Lesley Manville. The film, about three teenagers' drug-fuelled descent into violence in the seaside town of Newhaven,...
Members of the British film industry have paid tribute to Joseph Lang, who has died in Vietnam at the age of 33. The writer and producer was found dead on Monday outside a medical centre in Ho Chi Minh City. The cause of death is not yet known and Lang's Sussex-based family are awaiting the results of a post-mortem examination.
Lang's credits include the 2008 film Soi Cowboy, directed by Thomas Clay, described by the Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw as "a thoughtful and disquieting poetic meditation on the Thai experience of globalisation and its complex relationship with foreigners".
He also co-wrote and produced Clay's controversial 2005 feature The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, which starred Danny Dyer and Lesley Manville. The film, about three teenagers' drug-fuelled descent into violence in the seaside town of Newhaven,...
- 6/28/2013
- by Toby Chasseaud
- The Guardian - Film News
British film producer and writer Joseph Lang has been found dead in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, according to the Guardian.
Lang, who was 33, rose to fame in 2008 when he produced Soi Cowboy, which was a hit at film festivals around the world. He also wrote and produced The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael.
Lang's body was found outside a medical centre. The cause of death is not yet know....
Lang, who was 33, rose to fame in 2008 when he produced Soi Cowboy, which was a hit at film festivals around the world. He also wrote and produced The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael.
Lang's body was found outside a medical centre. The cause of death is not yet know....
- 6/27/2013
- by Jennie Kermode
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
A British take on the vampire romp naturally features a centuries-old prostitute in a rundown seaside town – with some 80s surrealism thrown in
The English seaside town is the end of the line – and the end of the world. That has been the prevailing mood in recent British movies like Paweł Pawlikowski's Last Resort, Thomas Clay's The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, and indeed Rowan Joffé's underrated new version of Brighton Rock, which, like this film, features Sam Riley.
And it is by a typically bleak British beach that Neil Jordan has created this florid, preposterous but watchable soap opera of the undead; it's a dark fantasy that contains a trace of his slight weakness for whimsy, but in some ways it's his most effective film for some time, adapted for the screen by Moira Buffini from her stage play A Vampire Story. The seaside town is unnamed, but...
The English seaside town is the end of the line – and the end of the world. That has been the prevailing mood in recent British movies like Paweł Pawlikowski's Last Resort, Thomas Clay's The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, and indeed Rowan Joffé's underrated new version of Brighton Rock, which, like this film, features Sam Riley.
And it is by a typically bleak British beach that Neil Jordan has created this florid, preposterous but watchable soap opera of the undead; it's a dark fantasy that contains a trace of his slight weakness for whimsy, but in some ways it's his most effective film for some time, adapted for the screen by Moira Buffini from her stage play A Vampire Story. The seaside town is unnamed, but...
- 5/31/2013
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
"Ben Wheatley's debut Down Terrace, about a Brighton crime family whose bickering resembles Abigail's Party, then Macbeth, had almost no budget and was literally home-made," begins Nick Hasted at the Arts Desk. "Many critics still realized that it was one of the best and most original films of 2010. With its cult success repeated in the Us, Wheatley has quickly followed it with the most assured and troubling British horror film in many years. Kill List confirms his promise while pinning you to your seat with scenes of cold nightmare."
"I'm unsure how or whether to describe it generically," admits the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "It's partly an occult chiller with shades of Wicker Man and Blair Witch – and be warned right now: there are some ultra-violent and infra-retch scenes that have had people making for the exits…. It often looks like a film by Lynne Ramsay or even Lucrecia Martel,...
"I'm unsure how or whether to describe it generically," admits the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "It's partly an occult chiller with shades of Wicker Man and Blair Witch – and be warned right now: there are some ultra-violent and infra-retch scenes that have had people making for the exits…. It often looks like a film by Lynne Ramsay or even Lucrecia Martel,...
- 9/2/2011
- MUBI
If Ricky Gervais or Mike Leigh made a horror film, it might look something like this unsettlingly strange offering from British director Ben Wheatley
The title, and the fact that this was popularly acclaimed at London's recent FrightFest event, will tip you off about what kind of film it is. Or will it? Even now, I'm unsure how or whether to describe it generically. It's partly an occult chiller with shades of Wicker Man and Blair Witch – and be warned right now: there are some ultra-violent and infra-retch scenes that have had people making for the exits. I wondered if director Ben Wheatley considered putting a death metal version of Maxwell's Silver Hammer over the closing credits.
Yet Kill List is also something else entirely. It often looks like a film by Lynne Ramsay or even Lucrecia Martel, composed in a dreamily unhurried arthouse-realist style that is concerned to capture texture,...
The title, and the fact that this was popularly acclaimed at London's recent FrightFest event, will tip you off about what kind of film it is. Or will it? Even now, I'm unsure how or whether to describe it generically. It's partly an occult chiller with shades of Wicker Man and Blair Witch – and be warned right now: there are some ultra-violent and infra-retch scenes that have had people making for the exits. I wondered if director Ben Wheatley considered putting a death metal version of Maxwell's Silver Hammer over the closing credits.
Yet Kill List is also something else entirely. It often looks like a film by Lynne Ramsay or even Lucrecia Martel, composed in a dreamily unhurried arthouse-realist style that is concerned to capture texture,...
- 9/1/2011
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Sci-fi gives birth to its very own Smurfs in James Cameron's ponderous epic
What is there left to be said about Avatar? Its record-breaking box-office success has surely vindicated writer-director James Cameron's creative arrogance, making him the auteur of not one but two of the most financially successful movies of all time. As a piece of spectacular cinema entertainment, it undeniably has the "wow" factor, with interludes of impressively verdant digital landscaping giving way to moments of genuinely jaw-dropping sci-fi action. There's plenty here that you simply won't have seen before – most notably an impressively fluid interaction between the real and virtual worlds that rivals Peter Jackson's work in Middle-earth. Nor is the film lacking in bald subtextual substance, with its tail of thuggish humans merrily ploughing down interstellar tree-huggers in the pursuit of "Unobtanium" being variously read as a parable of American imperialism, European colonialism, or...
What is there left to be said about Avatar? Its record-breaking box-office success has surely vindicated writer-director James Cameron's creative arrogance, making him the auteur of not one but two of the most financially successful movies of all time. As a piece of spectacular cinema entertainment, it undeniably has the "wow" factor, with interludes of impressively verdant digital landscaping giving way to moments of genuinely jaw-dropping sci-fi action. There's plenty here that you simply won't have seen before – most notably an impressively fluid interaction between the real and virtual worlds that rivals Peter Jackson's work in Middle-earth. Nor is the film lacking in bald subtextual substance, with its tail of thuggish humans merrily ploughing down interstellar tree-huggers in the pursuit of "Unobtanium" being variously read as a parable of American imperialism, European colonialism, or...
- 4/24/2010
- by Mark Kermode
- The Guardian - Film News
A rich fat Danish ex-pat pumped with Viagra and a young pregnant petite Thai girl live together in near silence in a house full of soft toys, meanwhile a teenage mafia enforcer must deliver his own brother’s severed head. Sound intriguing? Well, it’s not.
Writer and Director, Thomas Clay’s third feature, Soi Cowboy, is billed as an “indie thriller” but can be more aptly described as a momentous bore and anticlimax after the reception of 2005's The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael. A promising black and white grainy opening, with the kind of picture-postcard cinematography you’d find in the Tate gallery's shop, sets viewers up for immense disappointment.
Depicting the monotony of daily chores in the mundane existence of the protagonists, Clay chooses to avoid dialogue and occasionally subtitles too, favouring lengthy static shots of a wordless breakfast scene and full camera pans – its over ten...
Writer and Director, Thomas Clay’s third feature, Soi Cowboy, is billed as an “indie thriller” but can be more aptly described as a momentous bore and anticlimax after the reception of 2005's The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael. A promising black and white grainy opening, with the kind of picture-postcard cinematography you’d find in the Tate gallery's shop, sets viewers up for immense disappointment.
Depicting the monotony of daily chores in the mundane existence of the protagonists, Clay chooses to avoid dialogue and occasionally subtitles too, favouring lengthy static shots of a wordless breakfast scene and full camera pans – its over ten...
- 4/21/2010
- by admin@shadowlocked.com (Leo Owen)
- Shadowlocked
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