Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014)

You hope with biographies of artists that the seeds of their genius or the reasoning behind their work will be tackled at some point, as conventional a demand as that may be, but Mike Leigh does not seem interested in anything beyond Turner's place in society and therefore this remains an opaque work, accessible only as a character study of a man who did not fit into his time. Timothy Spall may have won the prize of all real prizes for a film actor for his portrayal, namely the Cannes one, but throughout it feels like Leigh doesn't really know where he's going with the direction of the character's eccentricity and consequently Spall's Turner is frequently reduced to a comic figure with the actor doing his level best to strive for variation in cycling through his repertoire of scowls, shuffles, grunts and mutterings. Incongruously juxtaposed against this is some beautiful, lambent cinematography, a first for a Leigh film, replicating scenes that Turner would come to paint.

6/10