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Patricia Clarkson’s homicide cop is the enigma in the director’s inspired reworking of a Martin Amis crime novel

Is there any voice in modern British cinema more singular or distinctive than that of Carol Morley? From the confessional revelations of The Alcohol Years, through the heart-breaking docudrama of Dreams of a Life, to the spine-tingling swoon of The Falling, Morley has proved herself an unflinchingly adventurous film-maker – what Werner Herzog would call “a good soldier for cinema”. In her latest film, her most ambitious to date, she takes a neo-noir murder mystery and turns it into a quasi-metaphysical rumination upon life, the universe and everything. It’s a feat she undertakes with the gusto of one who is unafraid to fall, conjuring a trail of iridescent movie magic as she sets her sights on the stars.

“You can tell a lot by looking,” says astrophysicist Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer...

16 year old Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams leads the cast in The Falling, a new feature film from writer/director Carol Morley which starts shooting this week.

The Falling tells the story of Lydia, the troubled girl at the centre of a mysterious fainting epidemic, who is determined to discover the cause of the malady spreading through her British all-girl school in 1969, a year when the whole world seems poised on the brink of change.

Maisie plays the intense Lydia with newcomer Florence Pugh as her best friend, the beautiful, rebellious Abbie.

Their all-girls school is ruled over by the enigmatic headmistress Miss Alvaro (Monica Dolan) with her deputy, the overly strict Miss Mantel (Greta Scacchi).

It's 1969, and the girls, like the world around them, are in a state of change. Abbie is embracing her sexuality, even sleeping with Lydia's beatnik brother. Lydia, neglected by her agoraphobic mother Eileen...

In 2003, when the badly decomposed body of 38-year-old Joyce Vincent was found on a sofa in her flat above a busy shopping district in Wood Green North London by bailiffs for the Metropolitan Housing Trust seeking back due rent, the news shocked the public. Nobody had reported her missing, even though she had been dead for three years. A pathologist could not determine the cause of her demise because nothing remained except a skeleton. Questioned by the police, neighbors admitted to noticing a foul odor emanating from the apartment but had never reported it. Stranger still, the television was on and she was surrounded by unopened Christmas presents. Joyce had, it seemed, vanished from the world without anyone bothering to notice. Filmmaker Carol Morley (a BAFTA nominee for her autobiographical documentary The Alcohol Years) was instantly intrigued and began a quest to find out everything she could about the deceased woman,...

Strand Releasing has acquired U.S. rights to the documentary "Dreams of Life," directed by BAFTA nominee Carol Morley ("The Alcohol Years"). The film screened earlier this year at the SXSW Film Festival. Strand will release it theatrically on August 3. Full release below: Strand Releasing has acquired all Us rights to Carol Morley’s critically acclaimed documentary Dreams Of A Life from Entertainment One (“eOne”). The deal was done between Jon Gerrans of Strand Releasing and Charlotte Mickie, Executive Vice President of eone films International. Nobody noticed when thirty-eight year old Joyce Vincent died in her apartment above a shopping mall in North London in 2003. When her skeleton was discovered three years later, her heating and her television were still on. Newspaper reports offered few details of Joyce’s life- not even a photograph. Who was Joyce Vincent? And how...

Compassion for lost souls pervades Carol Morley's film about marginalised people who come to a Dover hotel

With her superb documentary Dreams of a Life and the equally inspired early film The Alcohol Years, Carol Morley established herself as an exciting voice in British cinema. Here is her fiction feature, Edge, made in 2010, and though it's a minor piece compared to her confessional documentary work, it is a brooding, atmospheric drama with themes and ideas that intersect revealingly with the rest of Morley's films. A disparate group of people come to a Dover hotel in the wintry off-season: they are all marginalised, on the edge in every sense. Morley makes her location look weirdly otherworldly and beautiful. It looks as if it could be on another planet, or in someone's mind. In a way, it is. There's a strong sense of compassion for lost souls.

Rating: 3/5

DramaPeter Bradshaw

guardian.

A Guardian Open Weekend discussion revealed Dreams of a Life speaks to many in its account of the lonely life and death of Joyce Vincent

Yesterday I had the intensely enjoyable and stimulating experience of hosting a talk at the Guardian's Open Weekend event given by the film-maker Carol Morley about her remarkable film Dreams of a Life. Using interviews and dramatic reconstructions, Morley tells the tragic true story of Joyce Vincent, a lonely, beautiful woman in her 30s who had lost touch with friends and family and lay dead in her London council flat for three years without anyone apparently knowing or caring. The precise cause of death is unclear to this day.

Openness was the theme of the weekend, and openness was in many ways the theme of our discussion. The audience was packed with people who had seen Dreams of a Life at least once, and wanted...

Nobody noticed when Joyce Vincent died in her bedsit above a shopping mall in Wood Green, north London, in 2003.

Her body - sat on the sofa surrounded by Christmas presents she had been wrapping - wasn't discovered until three years later. The TV was still on. Newspaper reports offered few details of her life, not even a photograph.

Who was she? And how could this happen to someone in our so-called age of communication?

For her new film Dreams of a Life, filmmaker Carol Morley set out to find out. Joyce may have died in tragic isolation, but Morley was not going to let her be forgotten - and what she found out was extraordinary.

With her detective work far more successful than that of the police and council authorities, Carol traced Joyce's friends, colleagues and ex-boyfriends through ads in the local press, on black cabs and via online social networks.