Mr. Turner

Director: Mike Leigh

2014 / 150min / 35mm

Timothy Spall took home a Best Actor prize from Cannes for his portrayal of the gruff, brusque Joseph Mallord William Turner, the prodigiously gifted London barber’s son who, by the time he’d reached the middle age depicted here, had risen to the position of national institution thanks to the elemental force of his revolutionary art. Moving between the capital and Margate, between merry widow Marion Bailey and put-upon housekeeper Dorothy Atkinson, the irascible, barely articulate Turner of Leigh’s film is all-too-human in his lusts, his saturnine moods, and his inconsideration of others, but also superhuman—and, after a fashion, heroic—in his inexhaustible pursuit of the transcendent.

Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Part of The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters