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Critics reviews

MR. TURNER

Mike Leigh United Kingdom, 2014
The film essentially asks the age-old question of how an artist can be so sensitive to the beauty of nature while also being so insensitive to the people around him. While it's not likely that Leigh "identifies" with Turner in the manner of, say, Hayao Miyazaki and the artist-protagonist of THE WIND RISES, this is clearly a deeply felt work through which the filmmaker does convey personal feelings.
April 24, 2015
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Though I would venture to guess that the seventy-one year-old Leigh finds something heroic in his subject's adoption of an experimental "late style," his own displays more serenity than the brio and boldness of Turner, who was reported to boast "I am the real lion. I am the great lion of the day." The result is a decidedly earthbound tribute to an artist who kept his eyes on the sun.
December 22, 2014
Filmmaker Mike Leigh's biography of the landscape painter J.M.W. Turner is what critics call "austere"—which means it's slow and grim and deliberately hard to love—yet it's fascinating, and the performances and photography are outstanding.
December 19, 2014
While Leigh's working methods doubtlessly foster an environment in which the actor can thrive, Spall is the one who works up the internal storm: Rarely has an actor been so persuasive at simply showing a person stopped short and being overtaken with feeling, again and again, a pure openness to someone or something or some moment that is what allowed him to create what he did.
December 17, 2014
Seeing the exhibition and the film together is like watching a strange, exhilarating conversation. And what a fine film it is: rich, enjoyable, imaginative, faithful to Turner's spirit. Steering clear of familiar biopic clichés, it slides between modes like a Dickens novel, from the psychological depth of the central characters to jovial party scenes at Petworth and Punch-like caricatures of catty, competitive Royal Academicians.
November 13, 2014
Iron Mike Leigh's biopic of British Romantic painter, JMW Turner, bursts with such vivid detail that single frames stand alone as art. Watercolour opening credits morph into a Belgian field at dawn. Two worker women stroll by a river, their ordinary clothes and chatter imbued with grace by the orange sky above them. The camera then finds another figure in the distance. He's a portly silhouette with a downturned lip, a stove-pipe hat and eyes locked on to the landscape he's sketching.
October 29, 2014
Leigh is more concerned with re-situating Turner within the social and cultural context of his particular milieu; the material details of time and place are recreated with the same meticulous precision that distinguishedTopsy-Turvy and Vera Drake.
October 14, 2014
Leigh shows us the painter's inability to engage with the mundane reality of his surroundings: Here's a man who seems almost clinically incapable of dealing with other people. But the director then juxtaposes that with Turner's transcendent attempts to capture the sublime drama of nature. This is a very lived-in, immersive period picture and demands to be seen on a big screen.
September 25, 2014
For Leigh, film is nothing if it doesn't capture the odd and unappealing as often as it does the beautiful, and the holiness of light is useless if it doesn't reveal the ugliness of life as often as it finds its glory.
September 10, 2014
Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner puts the English painter's life under the microscope, but despite the enthusiasm of the vocal British contingent at Cannes, the film remains a largely conventional biopic, and, in episodically spanning a large chunk of the painters life, is denuded of most of its potential narrative dynamism.
July 11, 2014
Spall's performance fearlessly renders Turner as a man devoid of charm and social skills but absolutely dedicated to his uncompromising vision of painting, evolving from representation to the abstraction of nearly pure color and light.
July 7, 2014
Like Maurice Pialat with Van Gogh, Leigh has assumed an extremely sophisticated approach to the task of recounting the life of a true giant of painting, who worked in the divinely inhuman realm of light. Dick Pope's images stress the presence of light, while Leigh's dramatic focus is on that which might one day be dissolved in light's transcendence—indifference, callousness, cruelty, exploitation.
July 7, 2014